Abraham Alikhanov

Abram Isaakovich Alikhanov (; born Abraham Alikhanian; 8 December 1970) was a Soviet experimental physicist They had two sisters: Araksia (b. 1906) and Ruzanna (b. 1913). From 1912 to 1913, the family lived in Alexandropol, where Abraham attended a commercial college. They then moved to Tiflis, where they lived until 1918. The family then moved back to Alexandropol, where they lived until the 1920 Turkish–Armenian War. They then moved back to Tiflis, where Abraham graduated from a commercial college the next year. The first proper cyclotron in the Soviet Union was built at the Radium Institute in Leningrad by 1936.

Alikhanov "discovered that positrons were present even in the absence of a converter made from a heavy element, and this led him to the discovery of a new phenomenon—production of an electron-positron pair as a result of internal conversion of the energy of the excited nucleus." This was later used in nuclear spectroscopy. Alikhanov's group also studied scattering of fast electrons in matter and beta spectra of radioactive substances. Luis Walter Alvarez noted that the brothers received the Lenin Prize for their unverifiable discoveries and "for them to have retracted their claims would have been embarrassing to their government."

Alikhanov and his brother Artem established the Yerevan Physics Institute (YerPhI) in 1943 as a branch of Yerevan State University.

Career in Moscow (1943–68) After returning to Russia from Armenia, Alikhanov worked at the Institute for Physical Problems in Moscow from 1944 to 1946. He helped organize the Nuclear Physics Division of the Soviet Academy of Sciences. After the Soviet authorities learned of the German, British and American programs of nuclear weapons in mid-1942, works began on the Soviet project led by Igor Kurchatov. At Laboratory no. 2, Alikhanov was assigned to develop a nuclear pile with heavy water. Lev Artsimovich, Isaak Kikoin, and Anatoly Alexandrov worked on electromagnetic isotope separation, gaseous diffusion process and thermal diffusion process, respectively. While Alikhanov led the research on the construction of a heavy-water reactor. In August 1945 the Special Committee under the Council of Ministers (Council of People's Commissars) was formed to oversee works on uranium, headed by Lavrentiy Beria. The Scientific-Technical Council was headed by Boris Vannikov and included Alikhanov (initially as it scientific secretary), Igor Kurchatov, Pyotr Kapitsa, Abram Ioffe and others.

ITEP

On December 1, 1945, Laboratory no. 3 of the Soviet Academy of Sciences was established in Moscow with Alikhanov as its head. The laboratory was renamed to Heat-Engineering Laboratory (Теплотехническая лаборатория) in 1949 Alikhanov lead the institute for 23 years, until he retired in 1968.

At ITEP, Alikhanov led research on and advanced scintillation techniques, bubble chambers, and spark chambers. It was decommissioned in 1965 and subsequently disassembled. Until the end of his career, Alikhanov "remained a renowned head and a strong advocate" of heavy-water reactors, though graphite-moderated reactors were given the preference for their price.

Mikhail Shifman noted that Alikhanov was the "driving force behind the decision to build the first strong focusing accelerators" in the Soviet Union: at ITEP and at the Institute for High Energy Physics (IHEP) in Protvino, near Serpukhov. Abov noted that the decision by the Ministry of Defense was an "irreparable blow" for Alikhanov, because it "deprived the institute of any prospects for further development." The Ministry had alleged that the construction of the accelerator was slow, however, according to Abov, the Ministry had made a decision to transfer it to the IHEP from the very beginning.

Alikhanov was a close and lifelong friend of his colleague Lev Artsimovich. He frequented Artsimovich's apartment to tell stories about his friends the satirist Mikhail Zoshchenko, the poet Anna Akhmatova, and the composer Dmitri Shostakovich. The Armenian artist Martiros Sarian, a friend of his, painted a portrait of Alikhanov. It is owned by the Alikhanov family.

Alikhanov married twice. He had two children with his first wife, Anna Grigorievna Prokofieva, whom he married in 1925. His son, Ruben, was a physicist, while his daughter, Seda, was a writer. His second wife, Slava Solomonovna Roshal (1916–2016) was a violinist. They had two children: Tigran (1943–2013), a pianist, and Yevgenia (b. 1949), a violinist. Tigran served as rector (president) of the Moscow Conservatory in 2005–09.

Relationship with the Communist Party

Alikhanov never joined the Communist Party. Alikhanov later signed a collective letter addressed to the Soviet leaders asking them to return Kapitsa to the head of the Institute for Physical Problems.

In 1944 Alikhanov, along with Abram A. Ioffe, and Pyotr Kapitsa successfully appealed to Vice Premier Vyacheslav Molotov to prevent Anatoly Vlasov from assuming the chair of the Department of Theoretical Physics at the Faculty of Physics of the Moscow State University (MSU). Instead, Vladimir Fock was appointed.

He did not collaborate with the authorities during the antisemitic anti-cosmopolitan and the Doctors' plot campaigns in the post-war years when Jews were fired from their workplaces. Abov noted that Alikhanov protected his colleagues during the campaign, though "of course, there were victims, but he was able to minimize them."

In 1956 Alikhanov came under pressure when several members of the ITEP staff gave pro-democracy speeches at the institute's Communist Party organization. The party organization was disbanded. Alikhanov had a meeting with Khrushchev and the latter told him that he sought to prevent the arrest of the dissidents. In his turn, Alikhanov told the dissidents: "If you knew what you were doing, you're heroes. If you didn't, you're fools." Yuri Orlov, one of the dissidents who was forced to leave ITEP, found work at the Yerevan Physics Institute, headed by Alikhanov's brother, Artem. In March 1966 he joined Pyotr Kapitsa, Andrei Sakharov and others calling on Leonid Brezhnev not to rehabilitate Stalin.

Recognition and legacy

"For all of the many facets of his scientific career, Alikhanov was primarily an experimental physicist—an experimentor in the highest sense of the word, as exemplified by Faraday and Rutherford." — from obituary in Uspekhi Fizicheskikh Nauk (1974) A 1974 obituary in Soviet Physics Uspekhi called Alikhanov "one of the founders of nuclear physics in our country." opined that Alikhanov's research from 1933 to 1940 was worthy of a Nobel Prize. Yuri Orlov suggested that Alikhanov "was not such a genius as Landau or Kapitsa", but argued that he was "a distinguished scientist and honest man", who transmitted to his students "his awesomely high standards."

A street in Yerevan is named for the Alikhanian brothers, while in Moscow was renamed in 2018.

An hour long documentary film on Alikhanov was produced by the Public TV of Armenia in 2019.

Honors

Awards Corresponding member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences (January 1939) Full member (Academician) of the Soviet Academy of Sciences (27 September 1943) Full member (Academician) of the Armenian Academy of Sciences (1943) Foreign member of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts (1962)