Abrikosov Aleksey Alekseyevich (June 25, 1928, Moscow — 2017) was a Soviet and American theoretical physicist, Nobel Prize laureate in Physics (2003), member of the Russian Academy of Sciences, and Doctor of Physical and Mathematical Sciences. His main works are in the field of condensed matter physics, including the theory of superconductivity. Nizhny Novgorod connection: in 1970–1972 he taught at Gorky State University.
Scientific Career
Abrikosov was born into a family of pathologists: his father, Academician Aleksey Ivanovich Abrikosov, headed the Department of Pathological Anatomy at the Second Moscow State University (from 1930, the First Moscow Medical Institute), and his mother, Fanya Davidovna Wulf, worked as a department assistant and as a prosector at the Kremlin Hospital. In 1943 he began studying power engineering, but in 1945 he switched to physics. After receiving his degree in 1948, he wrote his candidate's dissertation under the supervision of Lev Landau at the Institute for Physical Problems in Moscow and defended it in 1951 ("Thermal Diffusion in Fully and Partially Ionized Plasmas"). In 1955 he defended his doctoral dissertation on high-energy quantum electrodynamics.
In 1965 Abrikosov headed the Department of Theoretical Physics of Continuous Media at the newly founded Institute of Theoretical Physics. In 1975 he became an honorary doctor of the University of Lausanne. From 1988 to 1991 he directed the Institute of High Pressure Physics in Troitsk. In 1991 he accepted an invitation from Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois and moved to the United States, and in 1999 he took American citizenship.
Abrikosov's chief scientific achievement was the discovery, together with the experimental physicist Nikolay Zavaritsky, of a new class of superconductors — type II superconductors, which retain their properties even in the presence of strong magnetic fields (up to 25 T). The theoretical explanation of this phenomenon, developed on the basis of the Ginzburg–Landau theory, involves the formation of a regular lattice of magnetic vortices, which came to be known as the Abrikosov vortex lattice. At Argonne Laboratory, Abrikosov explained the properties of cuprate-based high-temperature superconductors and in 1998 identified the effect of linear quantum magnetoresistance, first measured by Pyotr Kapitsa as early as 1928 but not previously recognized as an independent physical effect.
In 2003 Abrikosov, together with Vitaly Ginzburg and Anthony Leggett, received the Nobel Prize in Physics for pioneering contributions to the theory of superconductors and superfluids. He was a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, the Russian Academy of Sciences, the Royal Society, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Connection with Gorky
Until 1969 Abrikosov taught at Moscow State University, and then in 1970–1972 at Gorky State University (now Lobachevsky University). From 1976 to 1991 he headed the Department of Theoretical Physics at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology. In the United States he taught at the University of Illinois (Chicago) and the University of Utah, and in the United Kingdom at Loughborough University.
Sources
- urfodu.ru — Aleksey Alekseyevich Abrikosov
- museum.mipt.ru — Abrikosov Aleksey Alekseyevich — MIPT History Museum