Isaak Kikoin

Isaak Konstantinovich (Kushelevich) Kikoin (; 28 March 1908 – 28 December 1984) was a Soviet physicist and an author of physics textbooks in Russian language who played an important role in the Soviet nuclear weapons program.

Biography

Kikoin was born in the town of Novye Zhagory (now Žagarė in Lithuania), Russian Empire, in a Lithuanian Jewish family; his parents, Kushel Isaakovich and Bunya Israilevna, were school teachers. During World War I, his family was relocated deeper into Russia, and Kikoin enrolled in a gymnazium in Pskov. Upon graduation, he went on to study physics at the Leningrad Polytechnic Institute in 1925. It was Kurchatov who brought Kikoin in Soviet program of nuclear weapons and assigned him the Uranium enrichment project at this Laboratory No. 2 using the gaseous diffusion method took place under Kikoin while Lev Artsimovich worked on electromagnetic isotope separation. During the Russian Alsos, he went to Germany to locate German knowledge that would prove useful in Soviet programs.

He remained associate with Soviet program of nuclear weapons, and was an academician of the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union and was awarded the Stalin Prize a total of four times (1942, 1949, 1951, 1953), the Lenin Prize in 1959, and the USSR State Prize in 1967 and 1980. Kikoin was named a Hero of Socialist Labour (1951); he also won the Kurchatov Medal (1971).