Lev Wassiljewitsch Schubnikow

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Lev Shubnikov

Lev Wassiljewitsch Schubnikow ( Russian Лев Васильевич Шубников , English transliteration Lev Shubnikov; born September 9, 1901 in Saint Petersburg ; † November 10, 1937 ) was a Soviet physicist.

Live and act

Schubnikow was the son of an accountant in Saint Petersburg and studied from 1918 at the State University of Saint Petersburg , from 1922 at the State Polytechnic University of Saint Petersburg . During the time of the Russian Civil War, studying was difficult: when he accidentally sailed into Finnish waters in his sailing boat in 1921, he was expelled to Germany and was only able to return to Russia in 1922, where he continued his studies until he graduated in 1926. As a student, he and Iwan Obreimow developed a new method for growing single crystals of metals. After completing his studies, on the recommendation of Abram Joffe , he went to Leiden in 1926 to the laboratory for low-temperature physics of Heike Kamerlingh Onnes , which at the time was already headed by his student Wander Johannes de Haas . Schubnikow stayed there until 1930. It was there that they both discovered the Schubnikow-de-Haas effect , which is still widely used to investigate electrons in solids . In 1930 he returned to the Soviet Union and became head of the low-temperature laboratory at the newly established Institute of Physics and Technology of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences in Kharkiv , Ukraine (which Obreinov was in charge of). In 1935 he discovered antiferromagnetism and in 1936 paramagnetism (with Boris Lazarew) of solid hydrogen. He was one of the first to have large quantities of helium, which is liquid at low temperatures, available in the laboratory, and in fact since 1931 and in larger quantities from 1934, after Meißner from Berlin introduced his liquefaction method there. In Kharkiv there was also a close collaboration and friendship with the theorist Lev Landau (after Landau's initial skepticism). In 1937, shortly before his death, Schubnikow and his group also did pioneering work in the discovery of type II superconductors . Neither Lew Landau nor other scientists recognized then or later the importance of his experiments, which were only recognized after the rediscovery of type II superconductivity in 1961 in the USA ( John Kunzler and others, Bell Laboratories). The theory of superconductors of the second type was provided by Alexei Alexejewitsch Abrikossow (for which he received the Nobel Prize) and Pierre-Gilles de Gennes named the Schubnikow phase in the theory of type II superconductors after Schubnikow.

In 1937, like other colleagues at the Institute for Physics and Technology in Ukraine, he fell victim to a wave of NKVD purges . He was arrested on August 6th and sentenced to death and shot on November 10th. His execution was long kept secret in the Soviet Union.

He was posthumously rehabilitated in the Soviet Union. The Russian Academy of Sciences awards a Schubnikow Prize named after him.

literature

  • Helmut Rotter: Lev Shubnikov. Physics Pioneer, Landau ally, Secret Police Victim. In: Physics Today. Vol. 50, Issue 12, December 1996, ISSN  0031-9228 , pp. 95-96.
  • Helmut Rotter Lew Schubnikow- a scientific portrait , Physikalische Blätter 1997, online
  • Jagdish Mehra , Helmut Rechenberg : The completion of Quantum Mechanics. 1926-1941. Part 2: The conceptual completion and the extensions of quantum mechanics, 1932-1941. Epilogue: Aspects of the further development of quantum theory, 1942-1999. Subject index. Springer, New York NY et al. 2001, ISBN 0-387-95182-2 , p. 860 ( The historical development of quantum theory. Vol. 6), biography in footnote.
  • Anatoly Shepelev, Darvid Larbalestier: The Forgotten Discovery. Lev Wassiljewitsch Schubnikow discovered type II superconductivity 75 years ago , Physik Journal, Volume 10, 2011, No. 6, p. 51

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personal data
SURNAME Schubnikow, Lev Wassiljewitsch
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Шубников, Лев Васильевич (Russian)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Russian physicist
DATE OF BIRTH September 9, 1901
PLACE OF BIRTH St. Petersburg
DATE OF DEATH November 10, 1937