Evgenii Fedorovich Gross

Born Oct. 8 (20), 1897, in the city of Kolpino, in present-day Leningrad Oblast. Soviet physicist; corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR (1946).

Gross graduated from Leningrad University in 1924 and has been a professor there since 1938. He has worked since 1944 in the Physics and Engineering Institute, and since 1964 in the Semiconductors Institute, of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR. His principal works have been on the optics of rigid bodies. In 1930, Gross made quantitative measurements of the fine structure of a Rayleigh line, which is caused by the propagation of heat waves when light is scattered in crystals and fluids. In 1935 he discovered the spectra of intermolecular oscillations, or Gross frequencies. In 1951 he discovered the optical spectrum of exciton after having proved experimentally that excitons exist in crystals; subsequently he made a more detailed study of the properties of excitons and their role in various physical phenomena (photoconductivity, luminescence) and detected in them diamagnetism, the Zeeman and Stark effects, ionization in an external electrical field, inversion of the exciton’s magnetic field, Maxwellian distribution according to the velocity of the excitons, an optical analog of the Mössbauer effect, and the role of excitons in the coherent radiation of crystals. He also found the optical spectrum of biexciton. Gross has received the State Prize of the USSR (1946), the Lenin Prize (Leninskaia premiia) (1966), the Order of Lenin, and various medals.