I was in luck! A session called Session A16: History of Soviet Physics ran from 8-10:30 a.m. Monday morning. Another intern friend attended the session with me, and while the session did still involve a lot of old white men, for once I was able to follow along quite easily during a physics conference session.
The session included four talks, and in this blog post I’ll summarize what I learned from one of those talks.
Dubna: From a secret Research Laboratory to the International Joint Institute for Nuclear Research
Samoil Michelevich Bilenki, an 89-year-old Russian physicist, gave the second talk of the session, on the history of high-energy particle accelerator research in the Soviet Union. History of Dubna The story starts in the early 1940s. In 1944 and 1945, Soviet physicist V. I. Veksler and American physicist E. McMillan, respectively, discovered the phase stability principle independently. The phase stability principle gave scientists a mathematical understanding of how to successfully control the acceleration of particles, and let researchers start building particle accelerators that ran at much higher energies. |
The location chosen for the accelerator was located 120 km (75 miles) north of Moscow. The place was ideal for several reasons: 1) it was far from Moscow, 2) a nearby electro-power station would provide energy, and 3) the area was surrounded by rivers, which would provide water.
The accelerator launched on the night of December 13, 1949. The initial energy was 460 megaelectron volts (MeV), beating out the accelerator at Berkeley in the U.S., which was only 340 MeV. After an upgrade, the Soviet Union accelerator reached 680 MeV.
In 1957, an even higher-energy accelerator was finished, running at 10 GeV (1 GeV = 1,000 MeV). Up to 1959, it was the largest accelerator in the world, when the physics research organization CERN built a 28 GeV accelerator. Photo courtesy JINR. |
JINR is basically the socialist version of CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research), since JINR includes countries like Cuba and Poland.
This is where the talk gets interesting. At the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research (JINR), one of the main physicists was not Russian, but Italian. His name was Bruno Pontecorvo.
Pontecorvo is infamous in the physics world. Pontecorvo worked with Enrico Fermi in the early 1930’s on the famous radioactive isotope experiments, before fleeing Europe in 1940 to escape the Nazis (Pontecorvo was Jewish). He originally went to the United States, but ended up in Canada, where he started researching elementary particle physics, specifically neutrinos.
In February 1950, one of Pontecorvo’s colleagues was arrested for espionage, and as a consequence Pontecorvo was removed from access to Top Secret materials. In September 1950, Pontecorvo and his family disappeared on a trip to Italy, and in 1955 it was discovered they had fled to the Soviet Union (because Pontecorvo published some physics articles in prominent Soviet journals). Bruno Pontecorvo, 1955 |
When Pontecorvo defected in 1950, he went to work at JINR in Dubna. It is here that the lecturer for our talk, Samoil Bilenki, met Pontecorvo. Every Thursday JINR held a laboratory seminar, where the physicists would gather to share results of experiments and discuss future plans. Additionally, these sessions brought together theorists and experimentalists to brainstorm solutions to difficult problems. It is during these sessions that Bilenki got to know Pontecorvo.
Since 2000, the research center at Dubna has focused on superheavy element research, meaning they study the elements at the bottom of the periodic table. In collaboration with other laboratories, they have created some new heavy elements, whose names reflect the contributing laboratories. Some examples are: element 105 dubnium (named for Dubna), element 113 nihonium (named for Japan, using the Japanese word for Japan, ‘nihon’), and element 116 livermorium (named for Livermore National Laboratory in California).
All the discovered elements after 104 are synthetic ones produced through laboratory experiments (shown in blue). Image courtesy Wikimedia Commons.