Isaak Konstantinovich Kikoin

Born Mar. 15 (28), 1908, in Malye Zhagory. Soviet physicist. Academician of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR (1953; corresponding member, 1943). Hero of Socialist Labor (1951).

After graduating from the Leningrad Polytechnic Institute in 1930, Kikoin worked at the Leningrad Physicotechnical Institute. In 1936 he began working at the Institute of the Physics of Metals in Sverdlovsk, and in 1943 at the Institute of Atomic Energy. He became a professor at the Moscow Physical Engineering Institute in 1944, and at Moscow State University in 1955.

Kikoin’s principal works have been in atomic physics and technology and in solid-state physics. He discovered what is known as the Kikoin-Noskov effect in 1933 and was the first to observe the anisotropy of photoelectromagnetic effects in cubic crystals. He was also the first to measure the Hall effect in liquid metals and the influence of a magnetic field on their electrical conductivity, as well as the gyromagnetic effect in superconductors. He ascertained that the galvanomagnetic effects in ferromagnetic materials are determined by magnetization and not by magnetic induction. He performed a unique experiment disclosing the metallic nature of conduction in mercury vapor of high density.

Kikoin is chairman of the Commission on the School Physics Curriculum (since 1965) and the author of textbooks on physics for secondary schools and higher educational institutions. A recipient of the Lenin Prize in 1959 and the State Prize of the USSR in 1942, 1949, 1951, 1953, and 1967, he has been awarded five Orders of Lenin, three other orders, and various medals.