Gersch Izkowitsch Budker

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Gersh Budker , and Andrei Mikhailovich Budker, ( Russian Герш Ицкович Будкер , English transliteration Gersh Itskovich Budker and Andrei Mikhailovich Budker, * 1. May 1918 in Murafa , Podolia Governorate , today Rajon Sharhorod , Oblast Vinnytsia in Ukraine ; † 4th July 1977 in Akademgorodok ) was a Soviet (predominantly) theoretical physicist who dealt with nuclear fusion and accelerator physics.

Life

Budker was the son of a Jewish farm worker, studied from 1936 at Moscow University with Igor Tamm and after graduating in 1941 served in air defense , developing a new fire control system. After the Second World War he worked in Laboratory 2 in Moscow, later the Kurchatov Institute , with Igor Kurchatov and Arkadi Migdal on the physics of nuclear reactors . In 1950 he received the Soviet doctorate . Afterwards he was involved in the construction of a proton accelerator in Dubna . Budker founded his own accelerator research group as early as 1953. a. built a betatron , which was the leader in beam intensity at the time , and transferred this group to the Institute for Nuclear Physics (INP) in Akademgorodok in Novosibirsk , which he founded in 1959 and later named after him , of which he was the first director. There he established a "democratic" style of leadership that was relatively independent of political influence, such as that threatened in Moscow.

Budker played a key role in the development of accelerators, in particular he did pioneering work in this area in the early 1950s (especially resonance processes in accelerators), developed the concept of the “stabilized electron beam” (made known in the West at the Geneva Conference in 1956, but not at the time realizable) and was one of the first to propose accelerators with colliding electron beams and electron-positron storage rings (independent e.g. Bruno Touschek in Frascati ). The first accelerators with colliding electron beams were realized in VEP-1 in Novosibirsk, where the first experiments were carried out in 1965 (the work on these accelerator concepts became known in the west at a conference in Dubna in 1963), with electron-positron storage rings in 1967 in VEPP-2. In 1966 he proposed to cool particle beams with electron beams ( electron cooling ), which was first confirmed experimentally at the INP. Budker also advocated the industrial use of particle accelerators e.g. B. in material processing.

Budker also developed the concept of magnetic mirrors for confining plasma in fusion research and promoted research in this area at the INP. At the International Conference on Fusion Research in Novosibirsk in 1968, he suggested starting work on a fusion reactor directly.

Budker had been a member of the Siberian Department of the Soviet Academy of Sciences since 1958 and a full member (in the field of nuclear physics) since 1964. He received the Lenin Prize in 1967 (for his work on storage rings) and the Soviet State Prize (in 1951 for his work on accelerators).

His students include Spartak Beljajew , with whom he studied the relativistic plasmas occurring in accelerator beams in the late 1940s and early 1950s, and Boris Valerianowitsch Tschirikow .

Budker was married five times. He died of a heart attack.

literature

  • A. Skrinsky (editor): GI Budker: Reflections and Remembrances, 1988 (Russian), English 1993 (Boris Breizman (editor), with contributions by Migdal, Seldowitsch, Panofsky, Furth, Beljajew, Tschirikow, Okun, Sagdeew, O´ Neill)
  • Sidorov, Skrinsky, Chirikov: Obituary in Soviet Physics Usphekhi, Vol. 21, 1978, p. 369

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. He was never a member of the Communist Party. Sessler, Wilson Engines of Discovery , World Scientific 2007, p. 83
  2. Sessler, Wilson, loc. cit.