Alexander Kompaneets

Alexander Solomonovich Kompaneyets was a Soviet theoretical physicist, a student of Lev Landau, who worked at the Institute of Chemical Physics in Moscow and on the Soviet atomic project. He is remembered for the Kompaneets equation (1949), which describes how a photon field relaxes toward equilibrium through Compton scattering off electrons, with applications from cosmology to accretion disks. He was Jewish and appears on reference lists of Jewish physicists.