Igor Vasilyevich Kurchatov

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Kurchatov in the 1930s

Igor Kurchatov ( Russian Игорь Васильевич Курчатов , scientific transliteration Igor Vasil'evič Kurčatov , pronunciation: [ iˑɡə⁠rʲ vɐsiˑlʲjɪvʲɪʧʲ kʊ⁠rʧʲaˑtə⁠f ] * December 30, 1902 . Jul / 12. January  1903 greg. In Simski Zavod , government Ufa , Russian Empire ; †  February 7, 1960 in Moscow ) was a Soviet physicist and the head of the Soviet atomic bomb project . Since then he has been known as the "father of the Soviet atomic bomb".

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Igor Kurchatov was born in a village in the Ufa Governorate, which today belongs to the city of Sim in the Russian Oblast of Chelyabinsk . He studied physics at the State University in Simferopol and shipbuilding Polytechnic Institute in Petrograd . In 1925 he switched to the physio-technical institute , where he researched various problems of radioactivity under Abram Joffe . His younger brother Boris also came there . From 1932 he received funds with which he could finance a team of nuclear researchers.

Lev Wladimirowitsch Myssowski , Kurtschatow and their colleagues built the first Soviet cyclotron .

Monument to Kurchatov in the Kazakh city of Kurchatov in front of a building at the Semipalatinsk nuclear weapons test site

After the German attack on the Soviet Union in 1941, Kurchatov worked in the armaments industry. First he designed a protection device for ships against mines . Later he worked on improving the armor protection of the Soviet tanks .

In 1943 the Soviet secret service NKVD received a copy of a British secret report on the possibilities of nuclear weapons (the report of the MAUD commission ), which, despite the scarce resources during the war , led Stalin to initiate a Soviet nuclear weapons program. Stalin then recommended the then Foreign Minister Molotov to cooperate with Kurchatov. Kurchatov was eventually appointed director of the program. His brother Boris was one of his staff. The Soviet atomic bomb project was only given a relatively low priority at first until information from spy Klaus Fuchs and the atomic destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki drew Stalin's attention to the atomic bomb. Stalin ordered Kurchatov to produce a bomb until 1948 and appointed the secret service chief Lavrenti Beria to direct the project. The entire project was then moved to the city of Sarov in Gorky Oblast (now Nizhny Novgorod Oblast ) and renamed Arsamas-16 . The work of the team (which also included other prominent Soviet nuclear researchers such as Juli Borissowitsch Chariton , the scientific director of Arsamas, Jakow Seldowitsch and Andrei Sakharov ) was supported by scientific publications in the USA and information from Klaus Fuchs. Kurchatov and Beria (who questioned the information as deliberate misinformation) insisted on their own scientific research.

The first Soviet atomic bomb was detonated on August 29, 1949. Kurchatov then worked on the Soviet hydrogen bomb program (1953). He later called for the peaceful use of nuclear technology and stepped up against further nuclear bomb tests. He made many important contributions to the theory of atomic nuclei, thermonuclear reactions and plasma physics.

Kurchatov died in Moscow in 1960 while he was talking to his friend Chariton on a park bench. His urn was buried on the Kremlin wall .

Russian commemorative coin for the 100th birthday of Kurchatov, two rubles , 2003

Honors

In 1957 he received the Lenin Prize . He was also awarded the Stalin Prize and the State Prize of the USSR four times (1942, 1949, 1951, 1954). He was a hero of socialist labor three times (1949, 1951, 1954).

His former institute is named after him ( Kurchatov Institute ). The Belojarsk Nuclear Power Plant got his name. The Russian side also named the newly discovered element 104 after him: Kurchatowium , but internationally rutherfordium prevailed. In 1971 the town of Kurchatov near the Kursk nuclear power plant (now Russia ) was named after him. Since the beginning of the 1990s, the previously secret city at the Semipalatinsk nuclear weapons test site in Kazakhstan has also been named Kurchatov .

The Kurchatov Gold Medal , which has been awarded since 1962, is named in his honor. Mount Kurchatov and Pik Kurchatova in Antarctica also bear his name. The asteroid of the outer main belt (2352) Kurchatov is named after him, as is the lunar crater Kurchatov .

Trivia

literature

  • Andreas Heinemann-Grüder: The Soviet atomic bomb. Westfälisches Dampfboot Verlag, Münster 1992, ISBN 3-924550-65-4

Web links

Commons : Igor Kurchatov  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Lutz D. Schmadel : Dictionary of Minor Planet Names . Fifth Revised and Enlarged Edition. Ed .: Lutz D. Schmadel. 5th edition. Springer Verlag , Berlin , Heidelberg 2003, ISBN 978-3-540-29925-7 , pp.  186 (English, 992 pp., Link.springer.com [ONLINE; accessed on August 4, 2019] Original title: Dictionary of Minor Planet Names . First edition: Springer Verlag, Berlin, Heidelberg 1992): “1977 QA 3 . Discovered 1977 Aug. 22 by NS Chernykh at Nauchnyj. "
  2. ^ Gazetteer of Planetary Nomenclature
  3. Jump up RC Barber, NN Greenwood, AZ Hrynkiewicz, YP Jeannin, M. Lefort, M. Sakai, I. Ulehla, AP Wapstra, DH Wilkinson: Discovery of the transfermium elements. Part II: Introduction to discovery profiles. Part III: Discovery profiles of the transfermium elements (Note: For Part I see Pure Appl. Chem. , Vol. 63, No. 6, pp. 879-886, 1991). In: Pure and Applied Chemistry. 65, 1993, pp. 1757-1814, doi : 10.1351 / pac199365081757 .
  4. GN Flerov, Yu.Ts. Oganesyan, Yu.V. Lobanov, VI Kuznetsov, VA Druin, VP Perelygin, KA Gavrilov, SP Tretiakova, VM Plotko: Synthesis and physical identification of the isotope of element 104 with mass number 260. In: Physics Letters. 13, 1964, pp. 73-75, doi : 10.1016 / 0031-9163 (64) 90313-0 .