Nikolai B. Kopnin

Nikolai Borisovich Kopnin (May 17, 1946 – October 20, 2013) was a Russian physicist specializing in superconductivity.

Education and career

Born in Moscow, Kopnin earned a master's degree in physics in 1970 from Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology and a PhD in physics and mathematics in 1973 from the Landau Institute for Theoretical Physics, where his supervisor was Lev P. Gor’kov; his dissertation was on vortices in Type II superconductors. He remained at the Landau Institute as a researcher and in 1984 was awarded a higher doctorate and became a Leading Research Fellow. His 2001 monograph Theory of Nonequilibrium Superconductivity has been widely cited. He published more than 150 articles in international journals.

Honors

In 2011, with his Landau colleague S.V. Iordanskii, Kopnin was awarded the Simon Memorial Prize of the Institute of Physics for his work on the forces acting on quantum vortices in superfluids and superconductors.

Family

Nikolai Kopnin is survived by his widow Sidelnikova Anna and four children: Helen Kopnina, Anna Grifa, Petr Kopnin, Olga Kopnina.