Pyotr Kapitsa

Pyotr Leonidovich Kapitsa (Russian Пётр Леонидович Капица; * 26 Junijul / 8 July 1894greg in Kronstadt, .. † April 8, 1984 in Moscow) was a Russian physicist. He is the father of Sergei and Andrei Kapitsa.

Life and work

Kapitsa was born in Kronstadt, the son of the military engineer Leonid Kapitsa and lived as an adolescent in Saint Petersburg. At the local Polytechnic Institute in 1918, he finished his studies in physics. There he was, among other students of Abram Ioffe, on whose recommendation he worked with Ernest Rutherford in 1921 as director of the Cavendish Laboratory and the Moon laboratories of Cambridge University. On a visit to the Soviet Union in 1934 for family reasons him his passport was taken and he was forced to stay in the country. Kapitsa seemed then as director of the newly founded for him Academy Institute for Physical Problems, later Kapitsa Institute in Moscow. 1937 Kapitsa discovered the superfluidity of helium - fourth In 1978 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for his fundamental inventions and discoveries in low-temperature physics.

Appreciation

Pyotr Kapitsa was honorary doctorate at more than 30 universities and a member of many foreign academies, including the Royal Society and the Leopoldina in Halle ( since 1958). As a member of the Presidium of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, he took an important influence on the scientific life in his home country.

1959 was donated in his memory the Lomonosov Gold Medal of the Soviet Academy of Sciences. It is awarded annually by the Russian Academy of Sciences to a Russian and foreign scientists for outstanding achievements in science.

The asteroid ( 3437 ) Kapitsa was named after him.