научная статья по теме YAKOV ABRAMOVICH SMORODINSKY (30.12.17–16.10.92) AND LENINGRAD STATE UNIVERSITY Физика

Текст научной статьи на тему «YAKOV ABRAMOVICH SMORODINSKY (30.12.17–16.10.92) AND LENINGRAD STATE UNIVERSITY»

HUEPHAH 0H3HKA, 2009, moM 72, № 5, c. 930-931

IN MEMORY OF YAKOV ABRAMOVICH SMORODINSKY

YAKOV ABRAMOVICH SMORODINSKY (30.12.1917-16.10.1992) AND LENINGRAD STATE UNIVERSITY

© 2009 I. V. Komarov*

St.-Petersburg State University, Physics Department, Russia Received October 14, 2008

PACS: 01.60.+q

Yakov Abramovich Smorodinsky (30.12.17-16.10.92).

Ya. A. Smorodinsky: final-year student of Leningrad

State University, 1939.

Ya.A. Smorodinsky studied at the Leningrad State University from 1934 to 1939. When he entered the University, the Faculty of Physics was for a long time the first and the only Faculty of Physics at any university in the Soviet Union.

Smorodinsky's first scientific adviser was Matvey Petrovich Bronshtein (1906-1938).1> In 1935, M.P. Bronshtein published a paper "On the scattering of neutrons by protons" in the journal "Doklady Academii Nauk" [1]. It was a variation on the theme of the classical paper by H. Bethe and R. Peierls. M.P. Bronshtein worked in many fields of theoretical physics. In 1935 he defended his doctoral thesis on the quantization of the gravitational field.

Under the guidance of M.P. Bronshtein

* E-mail: ivkoma@rambler.ru

!)In 1991 The Ettore Majorana Foundation and Center for

Scientific Culture created the M.P. Bronshtein fellowship.

Ya.A. Smorodinsky began working on problems of low-energy nuclear physics.

In October 1936 arrests began in the Faculty of Physics and they continued for two years. The Department was deprived of its Dean. Seven of the eleven departments in the Faculty lost their Heads. In the spring of 1937 no lectures were given, because many of the lecturers were arrested and the new ones were not ready to lecture.

At that time Ya.A. Smorodinsky was a third and forth year undergraduate student. M.P. Bronshtein was arrested in August 1937. Even his wife, Lidiya Korneevna Chukovskaya, did not know what he was accused of. In December 1938 V.A. Fock wrote a letter defending M.P. Bronshtein. However, he did not know that Bronshtein had already been shot in February 1938.

The heads of all three theoretical divisions were arrested. Only one of them, V.A. Fock, was released after P.L. Kapitsa's intervention. There was an attempt to establish one Department out of the remaining two and M.P. Bronshtein was supposed to be its Head. After his arrest this position was occupied by L.E. Gurevich. Soon after that all three theoretical divisions were merged into the "Joint Department of Theoretical Physics". The word "joint" was then lost and up to 1962 the Faculty had only one Department of Theoretical Physics.

Ya.A. Smorodinsky completed his Diploma thesis under the supervision of L.E. Gurevich. The report of the Department reads: "On 1.04.1939 a student in his fifth year of studies Ya.A. Smorodinsky gave a lecture on the "Modern status of the theory of nuclear systems" (adviser L.E. Gurevich).

As we see, as a student Ya.A. Smorodinsky was a witness and an unintentional participant in the drama of the country and of the Faculty of Physics of Leningrad State University.

After that Ya.A. Smorodinsky started his graduate studies under L.D. Landau's supervision. The latter

YAKOV ABRAMOVICH SMORODINSKY

had been released from prison in the summer of 1939. Ya.A. Smorodinsky continued working on the problem formulated by M.P. Bronshtein. A famous paper on the scattering of protons by protons was published by Landau and Smorodinsky in 1944 [2].

I should mention that in the paper by Nyiri and Smorodinsky on eigenfunctions of the three-body problem [3], it was stressed that the quantum analog of Kowalevsky's top was unknown. In many respects my own scientific interests have been defined by this fact.

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REFERENCES

1. M. P. Bronshtein, Dok. Acad. Nauk SSSR 8, 75 (1935).

2. L. D. Landau, Ya. A. Smorodinsky, Zh. Eksp. Teor. Fiz. 14,269(1944).

3. J. Nyiri and Ya. A. Smorodinsky, Sov. J. Nucl. Phys. 12, 109(1971).

aflEPHAa OH3HKA tom 72 № 5 2009 10*

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