Lev Wladimirowitsch Altschuler

Lev Wladimirowitsch Altschuler ( Russian Лев Владимирович Альтшулер , English transcription Lev Altshuler; born November 9, 1913 in Moscow ; † December 23, 2003 ) was a Russian physicist. He has been involved in the Soviet atomic bomb project since its inception and a pioneer in physics of high pressure and temperature using shock waves.

Altschuler studied from 1934 at Lomonossow University , where he graduated in 1936. Before that, he had already worked in the X-ray laboratory of the Mechanical Engineering Research Institute in Moscow from 1932, together with his friends Weniamin Zukerman and Witali Ginsburg . 1940 to 1942 he was in the Red Army as an aircraft mechanic and then in military research. First he developed high-speed X-ray photography with Zukerman in order to study the effect of shaped charges on armor (both received the Stalin Prize for this in 1946 ). At the invitation of Juli Chariton , he was then involved in the atomic bomb project in the Arsamas-16 secret laboratory (today the Russian Federal Nuclear Research Center, WNIEF). Among other things, he investigated the behavior of metals in explosions and worked with the theorists Andrei Sakharov and Jakow Seldowitsch . He stayed there until 1969 when he became head of a laboratory at the Institute for Optical-Physical Measurements in Moscow. In 1989 he became a senior scientist at the Institute for High Energy Density of the Soviet Academy of Sciences .

In the 1950s he published work on the equations of state at pressures of up to 10 Mbar, generated by detonation fronts with a speed of around 15 km / s, which was a record at the time. In the USA at that time flat detonation fronts were used, with a third of the speed achieved by Altschuler. His method only became known in 1996 - he used concentric converging detonation fronts instead of flat fronts. Altschuler used these methods to study, for example, shock wave-induced phase transitions, novel phases of metals under extreme conditions, and the generation of non-ideal plasmas.

Altschuler received the State Prize of the USSR three times (1946, 1949 and 1953), the Lenin Prize in 1962 and the Russian Federation Prize in 1999. He received the 1991 Shock Compression Science Award from the American Physical Society .

As early as 1951, Altschuler spoke out in front of a government commission in a derogatory and negative manner against Trofim Lysenko and in favor of modern genetics, and only the intervention of Chariton and other scientists in Arsamas saved him from punishment. In other ways, too, he openly expressed his political opinion, which often deviated from the official communist position, for example in the 1956 Hungarian uprising . One of the reasons for this was that his admission to the Academy of Sciences in 1969 failed due to opposition from party members in Arsamas, a reason for his departure to Moscow.

His son Boris Altschuler (* 1939, Russian Борис Львович Альтшулер ) is also a physicist.

Fonts

• Altshuler, Wladimir Fortow , RF Trunin, AI Funtikov (editors) High pressure shock compression of solids VII: Shock Waves and Extremal States of Matter , Springer Verlag 2000

Web links

• Biography at AIRAPT