Yakov Borisovich
Zeldovich
1914-1987
Yakov Borisovich Zeldovich was a Soviet physicist and physicochemist, the Academician of the USSR Academy of Sciences, Doctor of Physical and Mathematical Sciences, Professor, thrice Hero of Socialist Labour. He was one of the creators of the atomic bomb (August 29, 1949) and the hydrogen bomb (1953) in the USSR. The most famous works of Yakov Borisovich are on the physics of combustion and explosion, detonation, nuclear physics, astrophysics, cosmology. He made the largest contribution to the development of the theory combustion. Almost all of his works in this field have become classic: the theory of incandescent surface ignition; the theory of thermal propagation of laminar flame in gases; theory of flame propagation limits; theory of condensed matter of combustion and others. Zeldovich proposed a model (the Zeldovich—Neumann—Dering model) for the propagation of a plane detonation wave in gas: the shock wave front adiabatically compresses the gas to a temperature at which chemical combustion reactions begin, which, in turn, support the steady propagation of the shock wave of combustion. He proposed a model for the propagation of a plane detonation wave in gas. In 1939, for the first time Yakov Zeldovich and Yuli Khariton calculated the kinetics of a chain reaction of fission in an aqueous solution of uranium. In Zeldovich’s works on cosmology, the main place was occupied by the problem of the formation of a large-scale structure of the Universe. Zeldovich and Solpiter in 1964 were the first (independently of each other) to put forward the assumption that the energy sources of quasars are accretion disks around massive black holes. A number of the effects predicted by Zeldovich received experimental confirmation. At the end of the XX — beginning of the XXI centuries, giant empty regions in the Universe were discovered, surrounded by galaxy clusters, and a decrease in the brightness temperature of the relic radio emission was detected in the directions of galaxy clusters with hot intergalactic gas (the Sunyaev—Zeldovich effect).
Address: Moscow, Miusskaya square, 4, bldg. V
