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Igor Tamm
Igor Yevgenyevich Tamm (Russian: И́горь Евге́ньевич Тамм; 8 July 1895 – 12 April 1971) was a Soviet physicist who received the 1958 Nobel Prize in Physics, jointly with Pavel Alekseyevich Cherenkov and Ilya Mikhailovich Frank, for their 1934 discovery and demonstration of Cherenkov radiation. He also predicted the quasi-particle of sound: the phonon; and in 1951, together with Andrei Sakharov, proposed the Tokamak system.
Igor Tamm was born in 1895 in Vladivostok into the family of Eugene Tamm, a civil engineer, and his wife Olga Davydova. According to Russian sources, Tamm had German noble descent on his father's side through his grandfather Theodor Tamm, who emigrated from Thuringia. Although his surname "Tamm" is rather common in Estonia, other sources state he was Jewish or had Jewish ancestry.
He studied at a gymnasium in Elisavetgrad (now Kropyvnytskyi, Ukraine). In 1913–1914 he studied at the University of Edinburgh together with his school-friend Boris Hessen.
At the outbreak of World War I in 1914 he joined the army as a volunteer field medic. In 1917 he joined the Revolutionary movement and became an active anti-war campaigner, serving on revolutionary committees after the March Revolution. He returned to the Moscow State University from which he graduated in 1918.
Tamm married Nataliya Shuyskaya (1894–1980) in September 1917. Shе belonged to a noble Rurikid Shuysky family. They eventually had two children, Irina (1921–2009, chemist) and Evgeny (1926–2008, experimental physicist and famous mountain climber, leader of the Soviet Everest expedition in 1982).
On 1 May 1923, Tamm began teaching physics at the Second Moscow State University. The same year, he finished his first scientific paper, Electrodynamics of the Anisotropic Medium in the Special Theory of Relativity. In 1928, he spent a few months with Paul Ehrenfest at the University of Leiden and made a life-long friendship with Paul Dirac. From 1934 until his death in 1971 Tamm was the head of the theoretical department at Lebedev Physical Institute in Moscow.
In 1932, Tamm published a paper with his proposal of the concept of surface states. This concept is important for metal–oxide–semiconductor field-effect transistor (MOSFET) physics.
In 1934, Tamm and Semen Altshuller suggested that the neutron has a non-zero magnetic moment, the idea was met with scepticism at that time, as the neutron was supposed to be an elementary particle with zero charge, and thus could not have a magnetic moment. The same year, Tamm coined an idea that proton-neutron interactions can be described as an exchange force transmitted by a yet unknown massive particle, this idea was later developed by Hideki Yukawa into a theory of meson forces.
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Igor Tamm
Igor Yevgenyevich Tamm (Russian: И́горь Евге́ньевич Тамм; 8 July 1895 – 12 April 1971) was a Soviet physicist who received the 1958 Nobel Prize in Physics, jointly with Pavel Alekseyevich Cherenkov and Ilya Mikhailovich Frank, for their 1934 discovery and demonstration of Cherenkov radiation. He also predicted the quasi-particle of sound: the phonon; and in 1951, together with Andrei Sakharov, proposed the Tokamak system.
Igor Tamm was born in 1895 in Vladivostok into the family of Eugene Tamm, a civil engineer, and his wife Olga Davydova. According to Russian sources, Tamm had German noble descent on his father's side through his grandfather Theodor Tamm, who emigrated from Thuringia. Although his surname "Tamm" is rather common in Estonia, other sources state he was Jewish or had Jewish ancestry.
He studied at a gymnasium in Elisavetgrad (now Kropyvnytskyi, Ukraine). In 1913–1914 he studied at the University of Edinburgh together with his school-friend Boris Hessen.
At the outbreak of World War I in 1914 he joined the army as a volunteer field medic. In 1917 he joined the Revolutionary movement and became an active anti-war campaigner, serving on revolutionary committees after the March Revolution. He returned to the Moscow State University from which he graduated in 1918.
Tamm married Nataliya Shuyskaya (1894–1980) in September 1917. Shе belonged to a noble Rurikid Shuysky family. They eventually had two children, Irina (1921–2009, chemist) and Evgeny (1926–2008, experimental physicist and famous mountain climber, leader of the Soviet Everest expedition in 1982).
On 1 May 1923, Tamm began teaching physics at the Second Moscow State University. The same year, he finished his first scientific paper, Electrodynamics of the Anisotropic Medium in the Special Theory of Relativity. In 1928, he spent a few months with Paul Ehrenfest at the University of Leiden and made a life-long friendship with Paul Dirac. From 1934 until his death in 1971 Tamm was the head of the theoretical department at Lebedev Physical Institute in Moscow.
In 1932, Tamm published a paper with his proposal of the concept of surface states. This concept is important for metal–oxide–semiconductor field-effect transistor (MOSFET) physics.
In 1934, Tamm and Semen Altshuller suggested that the neutron has a non-zero magnetic moment, the idea was met with scepticism at that time, as the neutron was supposed to be an elementary particle with zero charge, and thus could not have a magnetic moment. The same year, Tamm coined an idea that proton-neutron interactions can be described as an exchange force transmitted by a yet unknown massive particle, this idea was later developed by Hideki Yukawa into a theory of meson forces.