Isaak Markowitsch Chalatnikow

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Isaak Markovich Khalatnikov ( Russian Исаак Маркович Халатников , English transliteration Isaak Markovich Khalatnikov; born October 17, 1919 in Dnipro , then Yekaterinoslav, now part of Ukraine; † January 9, 2021 in Chernogolovka ) was a Soviet theoretical physicist or Russian theoretical physicist .

Chalatnikov studied at the State University of Dnepropetrovsk , where he graduated in physics in 1941 . In 1952 he received the Russian doctorate (habilitation) and then worked in the group of Lev Landau , with whom he inter alia. worked on the theory of superfluids (Landau-Chalatnikow theory) and with Landau and Isaak Pomeranschuk on the disappearance of the bare charge in quantum electrodynamics (see the article Lew Landau). From 1965 to 1992 Chalatnikow was the founding director of the Landau Institute. He was also a member of the Scientific Advisory Board at the International Center of Theoretical Physics (ICTP) in Trieste .

He became known through his work with Evgeni Michailowitsch Lifschitz and Wladimir Belinski in 1970 on singularities in general relativity , which originally investigated the question of whether cosmological solutions of Einstein's field equations necessarily have a singularity in time. Previously, Lifschitz and other Russian physicists had tried to show that singularities in general cannot occur in these theories, that is, that they are "not generic" and relics of the assumption of high symmetry. However, this was refuted by the singularity theorems of Stephen Hawking and Roger Penrose . Chalatnikov and the co-authors (who only examined the cosmological case) found that the matter radiation content near the singularity loses more and more importance and that therefore vacuum solutions of the Einstein equations can be investigated, and that solutions with rapid (oscillatory) changes in dominate over time (BKL conjecture, which has not yet been strictly proven). According to this theory, the solution near the singularity is supposed to be asymmetrical and chaotic (BKL singularity) similar to the Mixmaster universes by Charles Misner , which Chalatnikow and his co-authors had inspired. The resulting picture of singularities in general relativity was later also supported by numerical simulations.

Chalatnikow was from 1984 a member of the Russian Academy of Sciences (from 1972 as a corresponding member) and a foreign member of the Royal Society in London. He received the Landau Prize and the Alexander von Humboldt Prize . In 2005 he received the Blaise Pascal Medal . In 1953 he received the Stalin Prize and in 2010 the Tamm Medal . In 2012 he was awarded the Marcel Grossmann Prize . In 2019 an asteroid was named after him: (468725) Khalat .

He had good contacts within the Soviet power apparatus - his wife Valentina (1920–2005) was the daughter of the revolutionary hero Nikolai Shchors . With her, a doctor, he had three daughters.

literature

  • Isaak Khalatnikov: From the atomic bomb to the Landau Institute. Autobiography. Top non-secret , Springer Verlag 2012

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Умер старейший академик РАН Исаак Халатников. In: svoboda.org. Retrieved January 9, 2021 .
  2. ↑ Uspehkhi Fiz.Nauk, 1970, English translation in Belinsky, Chalatnikow, Lifschitz "Oscillatory approach to a singular point in relativistic cosmology", Advances in Physics Vol. 19, 1970, pp 525-573
  3. ↑ Grossmann Prize 2012, pdf
  4. ^ Memoirs of Alexander Polyakov
personal data
SURNAME Chalatnikow, Isaak Markowitsch
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Халатников, Исаак Маркович (Russian); Khalat (nickname)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Soviet or Russian theoretical physicist
DATE OF BIRTH October 17, 1919
PLACE OF BIRTH Ekaterinoslav
DATE OF DEATH January 9, 2021
Place of death Chernogolovka