Academician Flerov biography. Georgy Nikolaevich Flerov

Until 1990, Flerov headed the Laboratory of Nuclear Reactions at JINR, where, under his leadership, transuranic elements of the Periodic Table of Chemical Elements with numbers from 102 to 110 were synthesized.

• "Spontaneous fission of uranium nuclei" under No. 33 with priority dated June 14, 1940
• "Spontaneous fission of atomic nuclei from an excited state (spontaneously fissile isomers)" under No. 52 with priority dated January 24, 1962.
• "The phenomenon of delayed fission of atomic nuclei" under No. 160 with priority dated July 12, 1971
• "One hundred and third element - Lawrencium" under No. 132 with priority dated April 20, 1965 and August 10, 1967
• "One hundred and fourth element - Rutherfordium" under No. 37 with priority dated July 9, 1964
• "One hundred and fifth element - Dubnium" under No. 114 with priority dated February 18, 1970
• "Formation of a radioactive isotope of the element with atomic number 106 - Seaborgium" under No. 194 with priority dated July 11, 1974

He was buried at the Novodevichy cemetery.

Memory

• In Dubna, the Laboratory of Nuclear Reactions and the street on which he lived are named after G. N. Flerov, at the beginning of which there is a bust of an outstanding physicist and organizer of science.
• In honor of Flerov, it was named "Lyceum No. 6 of Dubna" - to them. Academician G. N. Flerov. This lyceum hosts an international school-conference for young researchers "Flerov Readings".
• In honor of Flerov, the 114th element is named flerovium.
• In 2013, the Russian Post issued a commemorative stamp dedicated to G. N. Flerov.
• In 2015, in Rostov-on-Don, a memorial plaque was opened on the house on the street. Pushkinskaya, 151, in which Flerov was born and spent his school years.
• Akademika Flerova Street in Moscow in the Severny district (named in October 2016).

Awards

• Hero of Socialist Labor.
• He was awarded two Orders of Lenin (1949, 1983), the Order of the October Revolution (1973), three Orders of the Red Banner of Labor (1959, 1963, 1975), the Order of the Patriotic War, 1st degree (1985), medals, foreign orders and medals.
• Laureate of the Lenin Prize (1967), twice winner of the Stalin Prize (1946, 1949), laureate of the State Prize of the USSR (1975).
• He was awarded the title "Honorary Citizen of the city of Dubna".

Family

Wife (since 1944) - Anna Viktorovna (nee: Podgurskaya 1916-2001), daughter of one of the founders of the Matsesta resort, balneologist Viktor Frantsevich Podgursky (1874-1927), of Polish origin. Son - Nikolai Georgievich Flerov (born 1945).

Nephew - Viktor Nikolaevich Flerov (born 1948), Doctor of Physical and Mathematical Sciences (1984), Professor of the School of Physics and Astronomy, Faculty of Exact Sciences, Tel Aviv University. Niece - Alla Nikolaevna Flerova (born 1940), Candidate of Chemical Sciences, Head of the Center for Monitoring the Innovative Development of Industry of the Federal State Unitary Enterprise.

A cousin (on the maternal side) is an ethnographer-orientalist, doctor of historical sciences, professor Evgeny Mikhailovich (Khaimovich) Zalkind (1912-1980), head of the department of general history of the Altai State University, author of numerous works on the history and ethnogenesis of the Buryats.

02.03.1913 - 19.11.1990

In 1938 he graduated from the Faculty of Engineering and Physics of the Leningrad Polytechnic Institute, whose dean was A.F. Ioffe, and went to work at the Leningrad Institute of Physics and Technology in the laboratory of I.V. Kurchatov.

In 1939, together with L.I. Rusinov proved that during the fission of uranium nuclei more than two secondary neutrons are emitted.

In 1940, together with K.A. Petrzhak discovered spontaneous fission of uranium nuclei.

In the first days of the war, G.N. Flerov joined the militia, but was soon drafted into the army and sent to Yoshkar-Ola as a student at the Air Force Academy. After graduating from the academy, he was sent to the front.

In 1941-1942. G.N. Flerov addressed letters to I.V. Kurchatov, S.V. Kaftanov and I.V. Stalin, in which he called on the government and scientists to resume work interrupted by the war on the uranium problem and the creation of the atomic bomb.

In 1943 G.N. Flerov was recalled from the front and included in a group of scientists involved in the creation of Soviet nuclear weapons.

In 1943-1960. G.N. Flerov worked at Laboratory No. 2 of the USSR Academy of Sciences (I.V. Kurchatov Institute of Atomic Energy).

G.N. Flerov determined the cross section for the interaction of slow neutrons with various materials, the critical masses of uranium-235 and plutonium.

In 1949 G.N. Flerov participated in the testing of the first atomic bomb in the USSR.

In the early 1950s G.N. Flerov began to develop a new direction in nuclear physics - the synthesis of superheavy elements of the periodic table and achieved outstanding results in this area. Under his leadership, experiments were successfully carried out on the synthesis of elements from 102 to 107, new physical phenomena were discovered: accelerated spontaneous fission of isomer nuclei, delayed fission of nuclei, decay of nuclei with the emission of delayed protons, a new class of nuclear reactions - reactions of elastic-inelastic transfer of nucleons, discovered relatively high stability with respect to spontaneous fission of extremely heavy nuclei with an atomic number greater than 104.

In 1960-1990. G.N. Flerov is Director of the Laboratory of Nuclear Reactions (FLNR) of the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research (JINR, Dubna). At present, FLNR JINR bears the name of G.N. Flerova.

G.N. Flerov paid much attention to the practical application of the achievements of nuclear physics, was one of the initiators of the development of nuclear physics methods for oil exploration and the rational development of oil fields, he proposed and developed an original pulsed method for neutron and gamma ray logging of oil reservoirs.

In 1953 he was elected a corresponding member, and in 1968 a full member of the USSR Academy of Sciences. G.N. Flerov was a member of the Commission on Nuclear Physics of the USSR Academy of Sciences, the Scientific Council of the USSR Academy of Sciences on Radiochemistry, and the Scientific Council of the USSR Academy of Sciences on Nuclear Physics.

He was a member of the editorial board of the journal "Physics of elementary particles and the atomic nucleus".

In 1987 he was awarded the Gold Medal. DI. Mendeleev Academy of Sciences of the USSR for a series of works on the synthesis and study of the properties of new transactinide elements of the table D.I. Mendeleev, in 1989 - the Gold Medal. I.V. Kurchatov for a series of works on the synthesis and study of the stability of the heaviest elements in intense ion beams.

G.N. Flerov was an honorary member of the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and a member of the German Academy of Naturalists "Leopoldina" (German Democratic Republic).

One hundred years ago, on March 2, 1913, Georgy Nikolaevich Flerov, one of the greatest nuclear physicists of the 20th century, was born, co-author of the first Soviet atomic bomb and discoveries of a number of new elements.

The popular legend about Flerov says that it was he who managed to convince Stalin to begin work on the military use of atomic energy. However, after the creation of the bomb, Flerov took up completely different matters in science, and there was no contradiction in this.

Nestling of the Fiztekhov Nest

Flerov was an enthusiast of nuclear physics. In the 1930s, he worked at the Leningrad Institute of Physics and Technology, the estate of Academician A.F. Ioffe, known for the fact that in the interwar period the color of Soviet physics worked there.

Before the war, a huge number of very different scientists passed through the Physicotechnical Institute - from Lev Landau crowned with all laurels to Georgy Gamow, who fled to the West. Everyone is a bright personality and an excellent specialist. By the way, throughout its history, the Physicotechnical Institute has raised three Nobel laureates: Landau, Nikolai Semenov, and, already in another generation, Zhores Alferov.

And most importantly, the physicists formed the core of the Soviet nuclear project. Project manager Igor Kurchatov, his deputy Anatoly Alexandrov, "bomb physicist" Georgy Flerov, chief designer Yuli Khariton, "explosive" Yakov Zeldovich - all of them paid tribute to the Leningrad Center for Nuclear Physics in the interwar period.

But the war began, and theorists moved on to actual practice. The Kurchatovs and Aleksandrovs, for example, dealt with the problem of protection against magnetic sea mines even before the war, and now they have completely switched over to this task. And Georgy Flerov went to the draft board - to sign up for the militia.

There, according to his recollections, they assessed his "luggage", and refused. They will kill you there, so let's teach you at least something first. Then, in principle, they will still kill, but not immediately and for the benefit of the cause. So Georgy Flerov became a junior technician-lieutenant of the Air Force, a specialist in the maintenance of on-board equipment of combat aircraft.

Interest in physics, however, did not disappear. Moreover, the problem of nuclear chain reactions gnawed at the restless Flerov from the inside and forced him to look for solutions. At some point, he was so impressed by the scale of the problem that he began to write letters to authorities, proving the significance of work on uranium fission.

In domestic practice (both before the revolution and after), such behavior, as a rule, leads to little. However, here everything happened a little differently.

Letter to a friend

The main myth accompanying Flerov's biography is the story of his letter to Stalin, after which the leader and father suddenly appreciated the prospects for atomic weapons and immediately launched the corresponding work. At the root of this legend lies the traditional Russian reassessment of the role of the individual, especially one like Stalin. Because "after" does not always mean "due to".

Flerov did write to the leader, but with this he did not begin an attempt to “break through a stone wall with his head” (quote from that same letter), but rather ended it. Before that, for at least half a year, he expansively pecked at everyone he could reach - including Igor Kurchatov and Sergey Kaftanov, the commissioner for science in the State Defense Committee (GKO - an emergency wartime body created to additionally centralize the country's government).

Academician Georgy Nikolaevich Flerov and Academician Yuri Tsolakovich Oganesyan

Traces of desperate attempts to convince others that they are right are also visible in the letter to Stalin. “This is that wall of silence, which I hope you will help me to break through, since this is the last letter, after which I lay down my arms and wait until I can solve the problem in Germany, England and the USA,” Flerov wrote to the leader.

With this he ended, but began by convincing his immediate army superiors in the autumn of 1941. When the matter got stuck in bureaucracy, he wrote several messages "over his head." At least two letters - in November 1941 and January 1942 - were written to Sergei Kaftanov.

Flerov reported that he was convinced of the possibility of military use of uranium (“one must always remember that the state that was the first to carry out a nuclear bomb will be able to dictate its conditions to the whole world”) and that he was able to find out one important circumstance regarding foreign atomic programs.

No presence detected

What did Flerov discover? He worked as a good intelligence analyst, with a mind at reading open sources. Having reached the fresh scientific periodicals in the interval between duties, he noticed that publications on nuclear physics had almost completely disappeared from foreign journals.

And this is after a whole avalanche of works at the very end of the 30s? Literally in 1939, Hahn and Strassmann made the most important discovery - they discovered the fact of fission of uranium nuclei under the action of neutrons. Yes, why go far: in the same 1939, Flerov himself, in company with Konstantin Petrzhak, discovered a new type of uranium fission in the Leningrad Physicotechnical Institute - spontaneous. Where, as scientists call it, is the “impact” of these discoveries, where is the trail of publications about related studies?

Flerov concluded that the foreign military was seriously interested in the creation of atomic weapons. “This silence is not the result of a lack of work; even articles that are a logical development of previously published ones are not printed, there are no promised articles, in a word, the seal of silence has been imposed on this issue, and this is the best indicator of what vigorous work is now going on abroad, ”he wrote to Kaftanov in December 1941 years (there is, however, reason to believe that this letter was read no earlier than March 1942).

He also wrote to his senior colleague Kurchatov. By the way, it was in a letter to Kurchatov that Flerov first substantiated one of the most widespread designs of atomic weapons later - the so-called "cannon scheme". In the interval of all this correspondence, Flerov managed to make a report in Kazan before a very representative meeting of physicists, which included, in particular, A.F. Ioffe and P.L. Kapitsa.

The camel was finished off together

The state apparatus, in general, had an idea of ​​the relevance of the problem since the end of 1941. In May 1942, along with Flerov's letter, an intelligence report passed through Stalin's secretariat stating that work was underway in the West on the "uranium problem."

At the same time, the fact of the abrupt disappearance of publications on nuclear physics from the open press was also verified. There is a reference dated June 1942 from the physicist Vitaly Khlopin, who headed the Committee on the Uranium Problem. In it, he points out: "This circumstance alone, it seems to me, gives reason to think that the relevant work is given importance and they are carried out in secret."

Flerov's theses were confirmed one by one. All this converged into one point - the point of decision. “We must do it,” Stalin laconically threw in the summer of 1942, after listening to a summary report on the topic.

Sergey Kaftanov will politely write that Flerov turned out to be "the initiator of the decision already taken." Here it makes sense to speak, at best, of a straw that broke the back of a camel that was already ready to fall. The analysis of the situation has been going on all this time, information from various sources, including German ones, has been received for at least six months, or even more.

There was no point in delaying further. In August 1942, Flerov was removed from the active army, they began to collect the rest of the nuclear physicists from non-core defense work. On September 28, a GKO resolution “On the organization of work on uranium” is issued. The project of the Soviet atomic bomb started.

Made a bomb and left

In the West, it is customary to compare the biographies of two creators of nuclear weapons - Robert Oppenheimer and Yuli Khariton. By the way, they almost met in 1926 in Cambridge - they missed each other by a matter of weeks. However, Flerov is much more suitable for comparison with Oppenheimer.

Judge for yourself: Oppenheimer, according to eyewitnesses, played a key role in the creation of the American nuclear bomb. But after the bomb was made, he turned down the offer to lead the work on thermonuclear weapons (Edward Teller took up this) and began an active anti-war campaign.

Flerov did not go across the political rut, but his nuclear weapons career is surprisingly similar to Oppenheimer's. Flerov was a leading player in the physical work of the Soviet bomb. In 1949, Soviet ammunition was successfully tested, and literally a year later Flerov left the weapons project.

Abandoned nuclear weapons, but not nuclear physics. In 1957, Flerov will head the laboratory of nuclear reactions in Dubna - at the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research. From that moment until his death (in 1990), Flerov's life was connected with Dubna.

He was engaged in a purely peaceful science - obtaining new elements of the periodic table, heavy transurans. In Dubna, under the direct supervision of Flerov, elements with serial numbers from 102 to 107 were synthesized. By the way, in the new nomenclature, the 105th element was named "dubnium" (until 1997 in Russia and the USSR it was known as nilsborium).

In 1998, after Flerov's death, in Dubna, together with American specialists from Livermore, they announced that they had managed to obtain an element with serial number 114, its existence, however, was confirmed only in 2011. And less than a year ago, in May 2012, it was officially given its own name - flerovium (Fl).

There is something deeply authentic in this story of a personality. To push an avalanche of a military atom from the mountains, solve the minimum necessary task of creating a bomb for your country - and then continue to engage in pure science for almost forty years. Oppenheimer was not enough for this, and he swung in the opposite direction - he began to politicize, either out of guilt, or for some other reason. Flerov, both before the atomic project, and on it, and after it, clearly understood what he was doing and why.

This, apparently, is the main distinguishing feature of any real scientist: to understand what and why you should do. It is desirable to understand before others and stand to the end. This phrase, perhaps, is the shortest record of the biography of Georgy Flerov.

Konstantin Bogdanov, material

G. N. FLEROV Youth.
Bio lines with comments (*)

G.N. Flerov's grandfather was a priest. Father - Flerov Nikolai Mikhailovich (born 1889), a native of Glukhov, in 1907 - a student at the medical faculty of Kyiv University, was exiled to Pechora for free-thinking and "riots". He was not alone - a whole group of students was sent there. Pechora, apparently, was a place for "political", since K.E. Voroshilov was also there.

In the place of exile, Nikolai Flerov met his future wife, Elizaveta Pavlovna.

After the expiration of the term, the young couple returned to the city of Rostov-on-Don, where the young wife was from. Here, on March 2, 1913, the second son, Yura Flerov, was born in the family.

Georgy Nikolaevich entered the school in Rostov in 1920. Usually at this point in the biography they say how a person showed himself from school - he studied well, was the first student in the class, or vice versa - he was not such, showed abilities in such and such subjects, or did not show them at all, etc. We do not know this and, most likely, no one paid attention to it then. If we recall history, these were the turbulent years of the formation of Soviet power on the Don; civil war, tax in kind, dispossession in the Kuban, riots of the Cossacks - in a word, the end of the "Quiet Don" and the beginning of "Virgin Soil Upturned". The south of Russia was most strongly exposed to all the life upheavals of that time.

I would like to especially note the role of Georgy Nikolaevich's mother. Fate was unfair to this woman. In these difficult years, she "pulled out" two young children, worked day and night as a proofreader in the Molot newspaper. She was left alone in Rostov when her sons left, and moved to Leningrad only at the end of 1938, when Georgy Nikolaevich received a room from the Fiztekh. Then the war and the blockade that claimed her life. The boys hardly knew their father. The fact that they have become highly educated, intelligent and worthy people, I think that they largely owe to their mother - this fragile and charming woman.

Let us return, however, to the hero of our story.

After graduating from a nine-year school in Rostov-on-Don in 1929, Georgy Nikolayevich, naturally, wanted to continue his education and enter a higher educational institution. But it wasn't easy at all. Despite the revolutionary views of his parents, who were even repressed under the tsarist regime, the formal origin of the young man was not a worker-peasant (father is an employee, mother is a housewife). This circumstance ruled out admission to any institution, where at that time only workers and peasants, or their children, were admitted. Therefore, it was necessary to accumulate seniority for several years in order to be considered a worker.

Immediately after school, Georgy Nikolayevich starts working as a laborer at a construction site. Soon he changes his job and for almost two years he has been working as an assistant electrician of the All-Union Electrotechnical Association in the city of Rostov-on-Don, quite a bit short of a continuous two-year experience. 1931-32 - oiler at a locomotive repair plant.

In 1932 Georgy Nikolaevich moves to Leningrad and goes to work as an electrician-parometrist at the Krasny Putilovets plant. Far from home, I had to earn a living, help my mother and prepare for the Institute. He lived with his aunt, Sofya Pavlovna, head of the therapeutic department of the Leningrad Regional Hospital, a businesslike, clear woman, later very famous in the medical circles of Leningrad. She helped Georgy Nikolayevich very much at this difficult time in his life.

In 1933, Georgy Nikolaevich went to work (note, he didn’t enter, but was sent to receive an engineering specialty) at the Leningrad Industrial (now Polytechnic) Institute. M.I. Kalinin and is accepted to the Faculty of Engineering and Physics. After entering the institute, he worked for a whole year at the Krasny Putilovets plant in night shifts. Scholarships for students were clearly not enough to live on. What is the start-up of the installation, equipment failure, exhausting work in the night shifts at the accelerator, our director knew firsthand.

The Leningrad Polytechnical Institute, founded at the beginning of the century by Count Witte, represented a unique institution in the second half of the 1930s. The great construction projects of communism, deployed throughout the country, needed capable, energetic and technically trained specialists. They say that thanks to S.M. Kirov, the rest of the pre-revolutionary professors of St. Petersburg were invited to work at the Leningrad University and the Polytechnic Institute. There were many famous names among them. The education that young people received was of a very high level.

It seems to me that if Georgy Nikolayevich had chosen another specialty, for example, a designer, builder, mechanic, then he would definitely have become as famous a specialist as he showed himself in physics.

He was offered to go to a group that was associated with Phystech. The offer was tempting, if only because it was possible to go to practice several times a day even without a coat - it was enough to cross the street.

Once in the Phystech environment, Georgy Nikolayevich felt that this was his "alma mater". A lot has been written about the school of A.F. Ioffe and the Phystech in the 1930s in the memoirs of contemporaries. Probably, it would be necessary to write even more about this unique institute of the post-revolutionary years, in which such outstanding physicists as Kurchatov, Kapitsa, Alikhanov, Semyonov Frenkel, Fok, Artsimovich, Obreimov and many others worked.

One episode from the student life of Georgy Nikolaevich. He, a 3rd year student, as well as other students, had to speak at a seminar on a given topic, having 1 month to prepare. Topic: "What is the Sun?" To put it bluntly, the topic is fundamental. I, somehow preparing for a report on the structure and properties of the decay of the boron-8 nucleus and related issues of solar neutrinos, involuntarily entered into the problem of our luminary and must say that the report at the seminar, even within the framework of the Standard Solar Model by a 3rd year student, is a phenomenon extraordinary even in our enlightened time.

The diploma work of student G.N. Flerov - "Study of the absorption of slow neutrons using a lithium indicator" was made at the LPTI. Head - Doctor of Physics and Mathematics. Sciences I.V. Kurchatov, Leningrad, 1938. Naturally, after graduating from the Institute, Georgy Nikolayevich was assigned to the Phystech in the group of I.V. Kurchatov. Igor Vasilyevich is only 10 years older than the graduate. But the young man treats him as a teacher not only in his graduation years, but all his life. There are many young people at Fiztekh, and so are Kurchatov's group. Everything is bubbling, and this is understandable. The neutron has been discovered, new (quantum) mechanics is not an abstraction, but a reality, a cyclotron is being built, fission has been discovered, and much more. The classic works that we refer to today were quite original then - they were discussed, argued, disagreed, but, definitely, they were not indifferent to them.

The hero of our story, of course, did not lag behind.

We do not know how Igor Vasilievich took Georgiy Nikolaevich, but, knowing his character, we can assume that he must have liked the obstinate young employee. But there were also difficulties. The newly renovated room for precise measurements (in my opinion, it was supposed to measure the isomerism of nuclei, the work of Rusinov and Kurchatov) one fine morning was covered in soot. Due to the fact that something did not work out at night according to the plan of Georgy Nikolayevich, the entire staircase, not to mention the room and appliances, were in such a state that the employees smeared in soot wrote a collective letter to the director of the Phystech A.F. Ioffe with a request to stop "Kurchatov's outrages". Igor Vasilyevich was forced to write an explanatory note. What was he thinking at that moment?! All measurements had to be postponed for a month!

In 1939, in the mountaineering camp "Gvandra" in the Caucasus, Georgy Nikolayevich met with Anna Viktorovna Podgurskaya, a graduate of Leningrad University. This girl also has an interesting biography. Polish by origin. Her great-grandfather and great-grandmother were executed during the Polish uprising. The father was a doctor. After graduating from Kharkov University, he went to the Caucasus and during the First World War he worked in a hospital in Pyatigorsk. My maternal grandfather was a very rich man. He owned land and, in particular, the entire valley of the Matsesta River. When the young people got married, the son-in-law convinced the father-in-law that Matsesta has healing properties and resorts should be built there. Most of the old hospitals were built by Anna Viktorovna's father. They also built a theater and a library. Apparently, therefore, when Soviet power was established in the Caucasus, they were not repressed. Father and father-in-law died in 1928 and 1927.

The meeting in the alpine camp did not continue, returning to Leningrad, everyone went about their business. Only in December 1941, Anna Viktorovna received a letter from Georgy Nikolaevich, where he asked to go to the Phystech and look at the magazines in the library. This was followed by instructions on what magazines and what to watch (let's find out G.N.-a!). There are bombings in Leningrad, transport does not work, Phystech is far away, and not before that. Anna Viktorovna did not go, but kept the letter. After the evacuation from Leningrad, I decided to drop a message to him. He was at that time near Voronezh. In the summer of 1943 they met in Moscow. In 1945, a son was born - Kolya Flerov.

Another twist of fate - 1939 - the beginning of experiments on spontaneous fission together with KA Petrzhak. Konstantin Antonovich is 7 years older than Georgy Nikolaevich. His path to physics deserves separate consideration. A respectable person (Georgy Nikolaevich is 26, and he, no joke, is already 33), handsome and calm. How often creative, and even life success, accompanies the alliance of opposites! Igor Vasilievich offers these two of his employees to engage in the fission of uranium.

Georgy Nikolaevich is already well versed in the recently discovered phenomenon of nuclear fission. Just two years ago, he attended the seminars of I.I. Gurevich. Now he has already completed experiments on the capture of slow neutrons by cadmium and mercury and measured, together with P.N. Rusinov for the first time the number of secondary neutrons in the fission of uranium, which turned out to be equal to 3 ± 1.

In 1989 in Washington, at a pompous conference dedicated to the 50th anniversary of the discovery of fission, people met who, for reasons of secrecy and national security, should never have met. But they knew each other from open publications, and more from closed ones. The American Zinn, speaking about the history of the American atomic project, showed in his report the same value, equal to 2 ± 0.2, obtained before the war by the Fermi group. Georgy Nikolayevich said to me in his hearts: "Well, who needed our data with such a terrible inaccuracy!"

It is not for me to judge whether it was possible to achieve more accurate results in the first measurements, but definitely, Flerov and Petrzhak achieved a very high, simply record-breaking sensitivity when registering fission fragments. This is what allowed them to make an outstanding discovery: the spontaneous fission of uranium. When measuring fission fragments under the action of neutrons, it turned out that even in the absence of a neutron source, the equipment registers pulses (several times per hour), similar to pulses from forced fission of uranium. I believe that it was precisely this circumstance that led Igor Vasilyevich to the idea of ​​instructing the "guys" to look for spontaneous fission.

They were not the first. The American Libby placed a counter filled with BF3 gas in a large mass of uranium, reacting to a neutron. Libby was trying to detect the neutrons emitted by uranium during spontaneous fission. In addition, he also made an attempt to chemically separate the beta-radioactive products of spontaneous fission of uranium. Both experiments gave a negative result, which determined the lower limit of the partial half-life of 1014 years. There was nothing surprising in this, since according to the calculations of the classics Niels Bohr and John Wheeler, the lifetime of uranium in relation to spontaneous fission was estimated at 1022 years. Libby missed 8 orders of magnitude.

God alone knows what guided Kurchatov, directing his pupils to search for spontaneous division. Believed them and did not believe Bohr?

In contrast to the Libby method, our heroes decided not to measure the radiation accompanying fission (neutrons or gamma rays), but directly fission fragments. However, each fragment had to be detected against the background of 10 million alpha particles. Therefore, many of the methods worked out and widely used by that time (Wilson chamber, photographic emulsions, scintillations) disappeared. Gas-powered meters were also rejected. A proportional ionization chamber was chosen, for which it was necessary to create a broadband linear amplifier with a gain of about 2.106. The amplifier, of course, was a tube amplifier, and the chamber with uranium layers with a total area of ​​\u200b\u200b1000 cm2 (and then 6000 cm2) was surprisingly similar to the variable capacitance from an old radio.

So, it can be argued that the established effect of spontaneous impulses is due to the acts of fission of uranium. Such a process represents a new type of radioactivity, fundamentally different from previously known types of radioactivity with the emission of alpha and beta particles.

The discrepancy between the experimentally observed lifetime of uranium and that indicated by Bohr and Wheeler is explained by the fact that the formula for the passage of a particle through a barrier is very sensitive to the chosen height and width of the barrier, and the choice of these values ​​is largely arbitrary.

We express our sincere gratitude to our leader, Prof. I.V. Kurchatov, who outlined all the main control experiments and took a direct part in the discussion of the results.

Brilliantly. What followed? The enthusiasm of colleagues, the scientific community of Leningrad? Not at all. At the very first Scientific Meeting, the scientific elite was extremely skeptical. Few people believed that uranium undergoes spontaneous fission with a probability 100 times less than the Libby experimental limit, but a million times higher than the great N. Bohr predicted. There were also such speeches: “Clearly, young people got carried away, it seems to them that they have made the greatest discovery. They may not yet know that there are cosmic rays that can cause uranium fission, and there is a lot of it in the chamber. Kurchatov?"

To the credit of working people, they argue less and do more. It was decided to test the resistance of the result to the deadly hypothesis of fission by cosmic radiation. A letter was written to People's Commissar Kaganovich asking for help. And young people with their strange baggage arrive in the capital in order to repeat experiments on spontaneous fission of uranium at the Dynamo metro station at a depth of 32 m. They rushed around Moscow all day, impatiently waiting for the night when the last train would stop and measurements could be taken (from 100 to 500 in the morning). The effect of spontaneous fission was completely repeated, although the flux of cosmic rays at this depth was weakened by almost 1000 times.

So, almost forty years after the discovery of radioactivity, the legendary Becquerel, Pierre and Marie Curie discovered a new type of decay of uranium nuclei - spontaneous fission.

I want to invite Yuri Luzhkov to hang a sign at the Dynamo metro station: “Here in 1940, young physicists K.A. Petrzhak and G.N. Flerov, working under the guidance of I.V. into two parts."

The war began, and in the fall of 1941, G.N. Flerov volunteered for the front. He was assigned as a lieutenant technician of the 900th reconnaissance aviation squadron of the Air Force Academy of the Southwestern Front. A military unit was evacuated to Yoshkar-Ola, the same school where the physicist studied electrical maintenance of combat aircraft.

War is war. Severe hungry time. Georgy Nikolaevich is settled with a lonely elderly woman, her husband and son are at the front. He supports her with military rations. His own mother in besieged Leningrad dies of dystrophy. The working hours of the school were extremely tense and left almost no time for extraneous reflections. From rise to rebound in the ranks. Flerov rushes about. He feels (Georgy Nikolayevich's amazing intuition - how many times have we witnessed this) that the level of understanding of the uranium problem allows us to begin a practical solution to the creation of a formidable, larger-scale weapon to defend the country. He writes letters to Panasyuk and Kurchatov. At the end of 1941, he decided to turn to the secretary of the party committee of the Faculty of Electrical Equipment, Lieutenant Colonel V.A. and organization of work. By decision of the head of the faculty N.M. Kadushkin, under the personal responsibility of V.A. Brustin, such a trip took place on December 7, 1941 with an order to return to the unit on December 22, 1941 (military transportation documents No. P4 509575).

By the new year of 1942, G.N. Flerov successfully graduated from college and was appointed to the air regiment of the active Army. In parting, Georgy Nikolaevich presented Brustin with his article "Spontaneous fission of uranium", published in collaboration with K.A. Petrzhak in the journal of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR for 1940 with the inscription: "To B.I. Brustin, along with gratitude for the good, human attitude towards the author. 12/31/41 G. Flerov. "Some time later, a telegram from the People's Commissariat of Defense arrived in the name of the head of the Academy, General A.R. Sharapov: "Private Flerov G.N. seconded to the disposal of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR.

This, as you know, was preceded by a letter from Flerov to I.V. Stalin. And that was the beginning of success.

Georgy Nikolaevich Flerov(February 17, 1913, Rostov-on-Don - November 19, 1990, Moscow) - Soviet nuclear physicist, co-founder of the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Dubna, Academician of the USSR Academy of Sciences (1968). Hero of Socialist Labor. Laureate of the Lenin Prize.

Biography

Georgy Flerov was born in Rostov-on-Don in the family of Nikolai Mikhailovich Flerov (1889-1928) and Elizaveta Pavlovna (Fruma-Leya Peretsovna) Brailovskaya (in her first marriage Schweitzer, 1888-1942). He had an older brother Nikolai (1911-1989). The father was the son of a priest from the town of Glukhov, Chernihiv province, Russian. Mother came from a Rostov Jewish family. As a student at the medical faculty of Kyiv University, in 1907 N. M. Flerov was expelled from the university for revolutionary activities and exiled to Pechora, where he met his wife. After the end of the exile, the couple returned to Rostov, where his grandfather and grandmother lived - Perets Khaimovich and Khana Simkhovna Brailovsky). Here Georgiy and his brother Nikolay graduated from a nine-year high school. After the death of their father, both were brought up by their mother, who worked as a proofreader in the editorial office of the Molot newspaper until she moved to her sons in Leningrad in 1938 (she died in besieged Leningrad in 1942).

After graduating from school in 1929, Georgy Nikolayevich worked as a laborer, then for almost two years as an assistant electrician of the All-Union Electrotechnical Association in Rostov-on-Don, and finally as a greaser at a locomotive repair plant. In 1932, he settled with his aunt, Sofya Pavlovna Brailovskaya, head of the therapeutic department of the Leningrad Regional Hospital, and went to work as an electrician-parometrist at the Krasny Putilovets plant. In 1933, he was sent by the plant to the Faculty of Engineering and Physics at the Leningrad Industrial Institute. M. I. Kalinina. He completed his thesis work in 1938 under the guidance of I. V. Kurchatov and was left in the group of the latter at the Phystech.

In the autumn of 1941, G. N. Flerov was drafted into the army and sent as a lieutenant technician to the 90th reconnaissance aviation squadron of the Air Force Academy of the South-Western Front, from which he was evacuated to Yoshkar-Ola and entered a school to train electrical maintenance of combat aircraft. In 1942, after graduating from college, he was sent to the air regiment of the army, but was soon seconded to the disposal of the USSR Academy of Sciences.

Scientific and social activities

In 1940, while working at the Leningrad Institute of Physics and Technology, together with K. A. Petrzhak, he discovered a new type of radioactive transformation - spontaneous fission of uranium nuclei.

In the autumn of 1942, at the height of the battles at the front, the journal “Reports of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR” (1942. Volume XXXVII, No. 2, p. 67) published an article “To the works: “Spontaneous fission of uranium” and “Spontaneous fission of thorium””.

Back in 1942, Georgy Flerov, who at that moment was simply exiled * as a tank lieutenant ** to the front, writes a letter to Stalin in which he explains why a nuclear bomb should be made, how it should be made, and that Western specialists are clearly working on it , because the publications of those who dealt with nuclear decay have disappeared from scientific journals, and no other publications by these same specialists on other topics have appeared. This letter is simply thrown away somewhere, and the decision to produce a nuclear bomb is made when Beria's spies report from London that the West has begun working on it. [unauthoritative source? 1381 days]

* - sent ** - by an aviation technician

Participated in the creation of the first Soviet atomic bomb RDS-1, in 1949 he personally conducted a risky experiment to determine the critical mass of plutonium. In 1953, Flerov was elected a corresponding member of the USSR Academy of Sciences, and in 1968 a full member of the Academy of Sciences. Member of the CPSU since 1955.

In 1955 he signed the Letter of Three Hundred. In 1968 - XXIV Mendeleev reader.

Thanks to his ideas, a number of chemical elements were obtained at JINR. Track membrane technologies developed by G. N. Flerov were used to eliminate the consequences of the disaster at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant.