Vladimir Iosifovich Veksler

Born Feb. 19 (Mar. 4), 1907, in Zhitomir; died Sept. 22, 1966, in Moscow. Soviet physicist. Academician of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR (1958; corresponding member, 1946). Academiciansecretary of the Nuclear Physics Department of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR from 1963 to 1966. Member of the CPSU from 1937.

Veksler graduated from the Moscow Power Engineering Institute in 1931. In 1936 he began working at the Physics Institute of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR and from 1949 worked simultaneously in Dubna, where he headed, beginning in 1954, the high energy laboratory he had set up. Veksler’s main works are on the physics principles of the acceleration of charged particles, on the physics of high energy, and on cosmic rays. He worked out new methods of accelerating charged particles. In 1944 he proposed the principle of phase stability, which made it possible to raise the energy limit reached by particles thousands of times. Between 1956 and 1966 he worked out the basis of the so-called collective method of acceleration. Veksler directed the creation of the USSR’s first synchrotron in 1947 and proton-synchrotron in 1957 in Dubna. He was editor in chief of the journal Iadernaia fizika (Nuclear Physics), which was founded in 1965 on his initiative. He founded a school of specialists in the field of acceleration physics and technology. Veksler was awarded the Lenin Prize in 1959, the State Prize of the USSR, and the International Atoms for Peace Award in 1963. He was also awarded three Orders of Lenin, the Order of the Red Banner of Labor, and various medals.