Ilya Frank

Origins and early life

Ilya Frank was born in Saint Petersburg on 23 October 1908, son of the mathematician Mikhail Frank and of the physician Yelizaveta Gratsianova; his uncle, the philosopher Semyon Frank, was expelled from Soviet Russia in 1922.

Work and career

His father, born into a Jewish family in Moscow, joined the Orthodox Church in 1902 in order to marry, and his mother, a priest's granddaughter, raised her sons in the Orthodox faith, a faith he lost in his youth. He studied at Moscow University under Sergey Vavilov, whom he regarded as his teacher, and after 1930 worked on luminescence at the State Optical Institute in Leningrad. In 1934 he joined the future Lebedev Physical Institute, took up nuclear physics and earned his doctorate in 1935, at twenty-six.

There, in 1934, Pavel Cherenkov saw a bluish glow around radioactive material in water, and in 1937 Frank and Igor Tamm explained it: a charged particle crossing a medium faster than light travels in it emits a kind of shock wave of light. Their theory made the glow a way to detect fast particles and measure their speed, and in 1945 Frank and Vitaly Ginzburg worked out the theory of transition radiation. From 1941 he headed the institute's Atomic Nucleus Laboratory, which worked on reactors for the Soviet atomic project, and from 1957 he directed the Laboratory of Neutron Physics in Dubna, now named after him.

Recognition

In 1958 he shared the Nobel Prize in Physics with Cherenkov and Tamm, for the discovery and the interpretation of the Cherenkov effect, after Lev Landau had told the committee that the glow was not understood until they explained it. He married the historian Ella Beilikhis in 1937; their son Alexander became a physicist and continued much of his work. A full member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences from 1968, he died in Moscow on 22 June 1990, at the age of eighty-one.