Alexander Kompaneyets


Alexander Solomonovich Kompaneyets was born on January 4, 1914, in Ekaterinoslav, Russian Empire and died on August 19, 1974, in Palanga, Lithuania. He was a prominent physicist, author of a number of textbooks, and collaborator on the Soviet atomic bomb project who lived mainly in Moscow.

Life

Kompaneyets was a student of Lev Landau in Kharkiv in the 1930s, where he dealt with solid state physics. In 1936 he received his doctorate and habilitated in 1939. He was a professor at the Institute of Chemical Physics at the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow and is best known for his introductory textbook on theoretical physics. He also dealt with the physics of detonation, which he wrote about in a book with Yakov Zeldovich, and generally about gases at high temperatures.
In 1956, he published a work on the movement of charged particles in intense radiation fields, which had arisen from secret work in the Soviet [atomic bomb project] and became important in the 1960s in works by Zeldovich and Rashid Sunyaev on the coupling of radiation and matter in the early universe. In the nuclear weapons program, he worked among others, Zeldovich since the 1940s, even at the theoretical examination of the early proposals of Zeldovich, Isaak Gurevich, Isaac Jakovlevic Pomeranchuk and Yulii Khariton on the hydrogen bomb. Kompaneyets dealt with many areas of theoretical physics, from chemical kinetics to biophysics.

Publications