Losev, Oleg

Born Apr. 27 (May 10), 1903, in Tver’, present-day Kalinin; died Jan. 22, 1942, in Leningrad. Soviet radiophysicist.

In 1919, Losev joined the Nizhny Novgorod Radio Laboratory. In 1929 he began working at the Leningrad Physicotechnical Institute and, in 1938, at the First Leningrad Medical Institute. In 1922 he detected the ability of certain crystalline semiconductors (such as zincite) to generate high-frequency electrical oscillations. On the basis of this phenomenon he constructed a regenerative semiconductor receiver and later a heterodyne receiver that became widely known in amateur radio as the “crystadyne” (oscillating crystal receiver). In 1925-26 he discovered and studied the phenomenon of transformation in nonlinear dipoles of a signal of one frequency into a signal of another frequency, with any ratio of frequencies. In 1927 he detected the luminescence of a generating semiconductor crystal of carborundum (“Losev’s glow”).

Losev also studied the photoelectric effect in semiconductors and proposed a new method of producing photocells. The design of an instrument for detecting metal objects in wounds was his last work, which was carried out during the Leningrad blockade.