Bagdasarian, Khristofor Stepanovich

Born Nov. 18, 1908, in Paris. Soviet physical chemist, corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR (1968).

Bagdasar’ian graduated from the Moscow Chemical Engineering Institute in 1931. He began to work in the Karpov Institute of Physics and Chemistry as a senior scientist and laboratory chief in 1936. Much of Bagdasar’ian’s research deals with the kinetics and mechanism of the reactions of free radicals and elementary photochemical and radiation chemical reactions. He proposed a general theory based on the concept of an activated complex to account for the effect that molecular structure exerts on the rate of radical reactions. The previously established empirical laws in this field (Polanyi’s rule, Alfrey-Price equation, and others) were in essence found to follow this theory. Bagdasar’ian was the first to demonstrate the existence of two-quanta photochemical reactions—a special class of photochemical reactions in which the chemical act results from the successive absorption of two light quanta, when the second quantum is absorbed by the molecule in the triplet state. Bagdasar’ian is the author of the monograph Teoriia radikal’noi polimeriza-tsii (Theory of Radical Polymerization [the second revised edition appeared in 1966]). The book has been translated into several foreign languages.