Gersh Budker

Gersch Izkowitsch Budker, also Andrei Mikhailovich Budker, (Russian Герш Ицкович Будкер, English transliteration Gersh Budker Itskovich or Andrei Mikhailovich Budker, born May 1, 1918 in Murafa, Rajon Scharhorod, Vinnytsia Oblast in Ukraine; † July 4, 1977 in Akademgorodok ) was a Soviet (mostly ) theoretical physicist who worked on nuclear fusion and accelerator physics.

Life

Budker was the son of a Jewish peasant, studied from 1936 at the Moscow State University with Igor Tamm and served after the completion in 1941 of military air defense, where he developed a new fire control system. After the war he worked in the laboratory 2 in Moscow, later Kurchatov Institute, with Igor Kurchatov and Arkady Migdal on the physics of nuclear reactors. In 1950 he was awarded the Soviet doctorate. After that, he was involved in the construction of a proton accelerator in Dubna. Budker founded already in 1953 a separate accelerator research group, which among other things then a leader in the beam intensity betatron built, and led this group in the 1959 he founded and later named after him, the Institute of Nuclear Physics ( INP) in Akademgorodok in Novosibirsk on its first director he was. There he established a "democratic" leadership style in relative independence from political influence as they are constantly threatened as in Moscow.

Budker was involved in the Soviet Union instrumental in the development of accelerators, in particular, he made the early 1950s, pioneering work in this area (particularly resonant processes in accelerators ), developed the concept of " stabilized electron beam " (in the west became known at the Geneva Conference in 1956, but at that time not possible ) and was one of the first, made the proposals for accelerators with colliding electron and electron-positron storage rings ( eg independent Bruno Touschek in Frascati). First accelerators with colliding electron beams were realized in the VEP -1 in Novosibirsk, where ran 1965 First experiments with electron-positron storage rings in 1967 at VEPP -2 ( known work on these accelerator concepts in the West at a conference in Dubna in 1963 were ). In 1966, he suggested that particle electron cooling ( electron cooling ), which was experimentally confirmed for the first time at the INP. Budker also called for the industrial use of particle accelerators such as in a material processing.

Budker also developed the concept for magnetic mirror plasma confinement in fusion research and promoted the research in this area at the INP. At the International Conference on fusion research in 1968 in Novosibirsk, he proposed to directly take over the work of a fusion reactor in attack.

Budker was since 1958 a member of the Siberian Branch of the Soviet Academy of Sciences and in 1964 a full member ( in the field of nuclear physics ). He was awarded the Lenin Prize in 1967 ( for his work on storage rings ) and the Soviet State Prize (1951 for his work on accelerator).

Among his students Spartak Belyaev, with whom he studied in the late 1940 's and early 1950's, appearing in accelerator beam relativistic plasmas, and Boris Chirikov Walerianowitsch.

Budker was married five times. He died of a heart attack.