USSR nuclear physicist. He was part of the team that built the first atomic bomb and the first nuclear reactor of the USSR.
(1904-1970) He was born on March 5, 1904, in Kirovabad (Ganja) Azerbaijan. He graduated from the Leningrad Polytechnic Institute in 1931. Together with his brother Alihanyan, he later directed his studies on the beta spectrum of artificial radioactive elements to cosmic radiation. Particularly for his research on chain nuclear reactions, during World War II. After World War II, he was assigned to the Uranium Institute, which was established to realize the first nuclear reactor and the first atomic bomb of the USSR. Alikhanov, whose work was rewarded by the state, was accepted as a member of the Nuclear Physics Department of the Soviet Academy of Sciences in 1943, and in 1959 he was appointed as the director of the Institute of Theoretical and Experimental Physics of the same academy. He died on December 8, 1970, in Moscow.
Abram Isaakovich Alikhanov (20 February 1904 – 8 December 1970) was a Soviet Armenian experimental physicist who specialized in particle and nuclear physics. He was one of the Soviet Union's leading physicists.
The successful attempts of the Joliot-Curies to split the uranium atom among France aroused great interest in the USSR, and in 1939 Kurchatov, Alikhanov, and other physicists started to work on chain reactions in Leningrad. With the positive results of the tests, they attracted the attention of the state to the issue of nuclear reactors and provided the necessary funds in 1940. However, due to the more important and current problems brought by the war, especially the German armies entering the territory of the USSR, the issue was put into the background for a while. In 1945, when the news that the USA was developing the first atomic bomb became certain, the USSR government accelerated the work and gave priority to the construction of nuclear weapons instead of nuclear reactors. At the Uranium Institute established in Moscow, a team of about ten physicists, including Alikhanov, led by Kurchatov, carried out the first chain uranium reaction in 1946. About two and a half years after this test and four years after the first atomic bomb (fission bomb) was tested by the USA on July 16, 1945, the first atomic bomb of the USSR (fission bomb) was detonated on August 29, 1949.
Postwar, the same team built the first Soviet nuclear reactor using uranium 235 as fuel and heavy water (deuterium oxide) as moderator. Then, Kurçatov, Alihanov, and other physicists, who focused on studies on thermonuclear reactions, tested the first thermonuclear bomb (H-bomb) resulting from the explosion energy fusion reaction in 1953, six months before the first thermonuclear bomb of the USA.
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