Alexei Smirnov

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'Alexei Yu Smirnov'

Born	USSR
Citizenship	Russian
Nationality	Russian
Fields	Physicist
Institutions	ICTP
Known for	MSW effect

Alexei Yu Smirnov (Russian: Алексей Cмирнов) is one of the world's leading researchers in the Neutrino Physics (as one of the founders of the MSW Effect).

1 Education
2 Research and achievements
3 References
4 See also
5 External links

[edit] Education

Alexei Smirnov graduated from Moscow State University in 1974. In 1977 he began working at the Institute for Nuclear Research (INR) of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR where he received his Ph.D. in 1979. In 1989 he received a degree of Doctor of Physical and Mathematical sciences. He also taught at the physics department of Moscow State University from 1982 to 1990.

Smirnov joined the International Centre for Theoretical Physics, ICTP (Trieste, Italy) in 1992 as a staff-associate while continuing his affiliation with INR (Moscow) as a leading research scientist. He became a staff member with ICTP in 1997 and presently holds the position of principal research scientist.

[edit] Research and achievements

The main area of Smirnov's research is neutrino physics and astrophysics. In 1984 -1985, following earlier work by Lincoln Wolfenstein, Smirnov, together with Stanislav Mikheyev, uncovered effects of resonance enhancement of neutrino oscillations in matter and the adiabatic conversion in non-uniform media (the MSW-effect). Solutions to the solar neutrino problem based on the MSW effect have been proposed. The effects were also applied to supernova neutrinos and neutrinos of various origins propagating in the Earth.^[1]

Alexei Smirnov is a co-recipient of the 2006 Bruno Pontecorvo Prize. He was being honoured “for his prediction and study of the influence of matter on neutrino oscillations", which is known as the MSW effect. He has been named a Humboldt Research Fellow, one of Germany's most prestigious awards in science. Smirnov was honoured for his lifetime achievements in physics. The award enables outstanding scientists and scholars from abroad to spend up to six months at the Humboldt Institute to carry out research on projects of their own choosing. Recently Alexei Smirnov with Stanislav Mikheyev have been awarded the 2008 J. J. Sakurai Prize "for pioneering and influential work on the enhancement of neutrino oscillations in matter, which is essential to a quantitative understanding of the solar neutrino flux".