Lev Shubnikov

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Lev Shubnikov

Lev Vasilyevich Shubnikov (Russian: Лев Васильевич Шубников; Ukrainian: Лев Васильович Шубников) (September 9, 1901— November 10, 1937) was a Russian physicist and experimenter who worked in Russia, Holland and Ukraine.

Shubnikov was born in Saint Petersburg to a family of an accountant. After graduating from a gimnasium he entered the Leningrad University. This was the first year of the Russian Civil War and he was the only student of that year attending the Physics department. Sailing on a yacht the Gulf of Finland in 1921 he accidentally sailed from Saint Petersburg to Finland, was sent to Germany and could return to Russia only in 1922. He continued his education in the Leningrad Polytechnical Institute which he graduated from in 1926. During his university training he worked with Ivan Obreimov, developing new method for growing monocrystals of metals.

In 1926 by the recommendations of Abram Ioffe he was sent to Leiden cryogenic laboratory (Netherlands) of Wander Johannes de Haas, there he worked until 1930. Shubnikov studied bismuth crystals of low impurity concentrations, and in cooperation with Wander Johannes de Haas he discovered magnetoresistance oscillations at the low temperatures in magnetic field (the Shubnikov-De Haas effect). The importance of the effect for the condensed state physics became completely clear much later. Today this effect is one of the principal instruments in studying quantum electron properties of solids.

In 1930 Shubnikov returned to Kharkov and established there the first Soviet cryogenic laboratory.

He also discovered antiferromagnetism (1935) and paramagnetism of solid state hydrogen (1936, together with Boris Lazarev). He was one of the first to study liquid helium.

In 1937 a falsified UPTI Affair (Ukrainian Physics and Technology Institute Affair) was launched by NKVD, and Shubnikov was convicted (along with a several colleagues) and executed (rehabilitate (Soviet)s posthumously). Until 1991 his date of death was falsified as well: e.g., Great Soviet Encyclopedia gives the year 1945.

Shubnikov Prize was established by the Russian Academy of Sciences.