Boris Chirikov

Boris Walerianowitsch Chirikov (Russian Борис Валерианович Чириков, scientific transliteration Boris Valerianovič Čirikov, English transliteration Boris Chirikov, born June 6, 1928 in Oryol, Russia, † 12 February, 2008 Akademgorodok, Novosibirsk ) was a Russian (mostly theoretical ) physicists, which dealt with non-linear dynamics and chaos theory.

Life

Chirikov grew up with his mother, a teacher and librarian, the father had left the family early. The family went in 1936 to escape the famine to Leningrad, where they were evacuated in 1942 during the siege of the city of Krasnodar. There they lived under German occupation. Shortly after the liberation in 1944 his mother died of leukemia. 1945 to 1952 he studied at the Moscow State University in the Physics and Technology Department, later the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology ( MITP ). He was then on the thermal Technical Laboratory ( TTL), which later became the Institute of Theoretical and Experimental Physics ( ITEP ) before 1954 Gersch Izkowitsch Budker 's group joined that line the LIPAN ( later part of the Kurchatov Institute ) with plasma physics and accelerator physics employed. In 1958 he followed Budker to the south Novosibirsk Akademgorodok founded in by this Institute for Nuclear Physics (INP, now Budker Institute of Nuclear Physics ). There he remained until his death. From 1959 he was professor at the Novosibirsk State University.

In 1983 he became a corresponding and 1992 full member of the Russian Academy of Sciences.

He was married and has a daughter.

Work

Chirikov was both a pioneer in the theory of classical chaos of Hamiltonian dynamical systems and quantum chaos. He began as an experimental physicist, but soon turned to the theory. His earliest work was the investigation (which dragged on for five years) the stability of relativistic electron beams in particle accelerators, which led to the construction of the Russian B-3 betatron. In 1959 he led in a work to explain the mysterious loss electrons in the plasma confinement in magnetic traps the Chirikov criterion that explains the occurrence of chaos (in this case in the chaotic diffusion of electrons) from the overlap of nonlinear resonances. It was (not least by Chirikov ) confirmed in many areas, but so far not mathematically rigorously proven. Andrei Kolmogorov, whose works with those of his disciple Vladimir Arnold at the same time revolutionized the field of mathematical side, said after Tschirikows seminar lecture in 1958 in which he presented this theory, which are the ideas of a " daring young man ."

A little later Chirikov turned already extensive computer simulations to study chaotic phenomena in such in the explanation of the Fermi - Pasta - Ulam paradox weakly nonlinear coupled oscillators in 1965. He also examined the " Chirikov standard map " in the classical phase space, which occurs in many dynamical systems in the consideration of the behavior in the vicinity of a fixed point, and its quantum version ( Kicked rotator, a periodic impulses, " Kicks", driven plane twisting motion). In the studies of the Kicked Rotator he discovered the phenomenon of dynamic localization in quantum chaos. Chirikov proved for example, which is the motion of Halley's comet messy (1989 ) and also the solutions of the classical homogeneous Yang-Mills equation in general are messy ( in technical terms: typical "generic" solutions have positive Kolmogorov -Sinai entropy ). Tschirikows lectures and review articles (especially the quoted below article in Physics Reports, 1979) were very influential in the development of chaos theory.

Many of the familiar concepts of nonlinear dynamics such as Arnold diffusion, KAM theory, Kolmogorov -Sinai entropy, were influenced by him. He also wrote works on philosophical issues that arise from the chaos theory.

Writings

• With Giulio Casati (Editor): Quantum Chaos: Between Order and Disorder, A Selection of Papers, Cambridge University Press 1995
• With I Meshkov: Electromagnetic Field, 2 volumes (Russian), Novosibirsk, Nauka, 1987
• A universal instability of many dimensional oscillator systems, Physics Reports, Bd.52, 1979, p.263
• With Casati, Guarneri, Dima Shepelyansky: Relevance of classical chaos in quantum mechanics: the hydrogen atom in a monochromatic field, Physics Reports, Volume 154, 1987, p.77 -123
• Time dependent quantum systems, in Voros, Giannoni, tin -Justin (Editor) "Chaos and quantum physics", Les Houches Lectures Bd.52, 1989, Elsevier 1991
• Particle dynamics in magnetic traps, in Kadomtsev (Editor): Reviews in Plasma Physics, Bd.13, 1987, p.1 -92, Consultants Bureau, New York
• With Izrailev, Shepelyansky: Dynamical stochasticity in classical and quantum mechanics, Soviet Scientific Reviews C, Vol.2, 1981, p.209, Harwood 1981
• Same: Quantum chaos: localization vs. ergodicity, Physica D, Bd.33, 1988, p 77
• Research Concerning the theory of nonlinear resonance and stochasticity, Preprint, Institute of Nuclear Physics, Novosibirsk, 1969, CERN 71-40 Translations