Isaak Jakowlewitsch Pomeranschuk

Isaak Pomeranchuk ( Russian Исаак Яковлевич Померанчук ., Scientific transliteration Isaac Jakovlevic Pomerančuk ; born May 7 ^{. Jul} / 20th May  1913 ^greg. In Warsaw ; †  14. December 1966 in Moscow ) was a Soviet physicist .

life and work

Pomeranschuk was born in Warsaw, Russia at that time, as the son of a chemical engineer (Jakow Isaakowitsch Pomeranschuk) and a doctor (Amalia Davidowna Pomeranschuk). In 1918 the family moved to Rostov-on-Don and in 1923 to Rubeschnoye in the Donets Basin , where he went to school. Pomeranschuk worked in a factory next to school and went to Ivanovo in 1931 to study chemical engineering. In 1932 he moved to the Polytechnic Institute in Leningrad , where he studied physical chemistry . In 1935 his superior Alexander Schalnikow recommended him to the theoretical physicist Lev Landau in Charkow (after he had destroyed several glass tubes for vacuum pumps ), whose notorious "Theoretical Minimum" (several written, very demanding exams under Landau's personal supervision) he received in just two months completed. Pomeranchuk became one of Landau's most loyal students, who later regularly attended his famous seminars in Moscow . In 1936 he published his first work on the scattering of photons on each other in Nature (with Alexander Achijeser ). In the 1930s he gave an upper limit of 10 ¹⁷  eV for the energy of charged particles measured on earth in cosmic radiation (due to the interaction with the earth's magnetic field ). He also worked on solid state physics .

In 1937 he followed Landau to Moscow and after his arrest in 1938 went to the University of Leningrad , where he received his doctorate and then worked at the Physics and Technology Institute in 1939/40. In 1940 he went to Moscow to the Lebedev Institute , where he did his doctorate with a thesis on heat conduction and sound absorption in dielectrics . During the Second World War he carried out research on cosmic rays in Armenia and from 1943 he was on Kurchatov's team in Laboratory No. 2, which developed the first Soviet nuclear reactor , which went into operation in 1946. He worked with Jakow Borissowitsch Seldowitsch . He soon became the leading nuclear reactor theorist in the Soviet Union, collaborating again with Achijeser (their fundamental work at the time, which was circulated as manuscripts, was published as a book by Boris Joffe and Gerasimov in 2002). At the end of the 1940s he also began to work on synchrotron radiation (including 1944 with Iwanenko on the maximum acceleration energy in the betatron , which was also the first published prediction of synchrotron radiation) and on superfluids . This was when the idea of Pomeranchuk cooling was born (1950).

In 1946, Seldowitsch, Issai Israilewitsch Gurewitsch , Pomeranschuk and Juli Borissowitsch Chariton presented the government with a proposal for a hydrogen bomb, which at the time was not even classified as secret and was initially not paid much attention to by the state authorities (this only changed when intelligence information on the work of the Americans pointed out).

After he was temporarily assigned to nuclear weapons research in 1950 , which could be turned off with Bogolyubov's help, he was again professor at the Institute for Theoretical and Experimental Physics (ITEP) in Moscow in 1951 , where he founded a seminar for quantum field theory . With Landau he succeeded in discovering that quantum electrodynamics (QED) and some other quantum field theories become arbitrarily strong for high energies - or, more precisely, that a finite value of the bare charge at high energies leads to its disappearance on "physical" scales. These discoveries led to quantum field theory being viewed with skepticism in the Landau School and beyond. The behavior of QED is in contrast to the behavior of the asymptotic freedom discovered in 1973 in quantum chromodynamics and other non-Abelian gauge theories. In 1958 he published his Pomeranschuk theorem (for high energies asymptotic equality of the cross sections for particles and antiparticles). In the 1960s he dealt with the then current developments in the S-matrix theory by Tullio Regge and others, often in collaboration with Vladimir Gribov in Leningrad (they also examined the hypothetical “ Pomeron ” named after Pomeranschuk ).

In the 1960s, Pomeranschuk was head of the Institute for Theoretical Physics at ITEP and at the same time professor at the Moscow Institute for Physical Technology (MEPHI). Since 1953 he was a corresponding and since 1964 full member of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR .

In 1965 he developed esophageal cancer. While he was still in hospital, he developed ideas for a therapy with proton accelerators, which were implemented at ITEP from 1969.

His students include Samoil Bilenki , Michael Marinov , Lev Okun , Igor Kobsarew , Vladimir Popov , Boris Joffe .

For his discovery of synchrotron radiation, he received the Stalin Prize in 1950 , which he also won in 1952.

Since 1998, ITEP has been awarding the Pomeranchuk Prize in his honor .

His nickname was Tschuk.

Fonts

• Collected essays (Собрание научных трудов). 3 volumes. Nauka, Moscow 1972

Web links

• Okun: The life and legacy of Pomeranschuk . 2003, arxiv : physics / 0307123
• Joffes memories of Landau and Pomeranschuk. 2002, arxiv : hep-ph / 0204295

Remarks

1. ↑ made Gershtein in RA Sunyaev (ed.), Zeldovich, Reminiscences, Taylor and Francis, 2004, p 161 First of Y. Romanov in Sakharov anthology Priroda in 1990 known
2. ↑ In his seminars, Landau refused to listen to the latest developments from Feynman , Dyson , Schwinger and others. a. enter into. So Joffe in his memories.