Igor Tamm

Igor Tamm
Igor Tamm
Born	July 8, 1895 (1895-07-08) Vladivostok, Russian Empire
Died	April 12, 1971 (1971-04-13) Moscow, Russia
Nationality	Russia
Fields	Physics
Known for	Cherenkov-Vavilov effect
Notable awards	Nobel Prize in Physics, 1958

Igor Yevgenyevich Tamm (Russian И́горь Евге́ньевич Та́мм) (July 8, 1895 – April 12, 1971) was a Soviet physicist, mathematician and a Nobel laureate.

Biography

Tamm was born in Vladivostok, Russian Empire (now Russia) in a Russian-German family (his grandfather emigrated from Thuringia)^[1], studied at the grammar school in Elisavetgrad (now Kirovohrad, Ukraine). In 1913-1914 he studied at the University of Edinburgh together with his gymnasium school friend Boris Hessen. He then moved to the Moscow State University from which graduated in 1918. In 1928 Igor Tamm spent a few months with Paul Ehrenfest at the University of Leiden.

In 1932, Igor Tamm published a paper with his proposal of the concept of surface states. This concept is important for MOSFET physics.

In 1945 he developed an approximation method for many-body physics. As Sidney Dancoff developed it independently in 1950, it is now called the Tamm-Dancoff approximation.

He was the Nobel Laureate in Physics for the year 1958 together with Pavel Alekseyevich Cherenkov and Ilya Mikhailovich Frank for the discovery and the interpretation of the Cherenkov-Vavilov effect.

In 1951 together with Andrei Dmitrievich Sakharov proposed a tokamak system of the realization of CTF on the basis of toroidal magnetic thermonuclear reactor and soon after the first such devices were built by the INF, resulting the T-3 Soviet magnetic confinement device from 1968, when the plasma parameters unique for that time were obtained, of showing the temperatures in their machine to be over an order of magnitude higher than what was expected by the rest of the community. The western scientists visited the experiment and verified the high temperatures and confinement, sparking a wave of optimism for the prospects of the tokamak as well as construction of new experiments, which is still the dominant magnetic confinement device today.

Tamm died in Moscow, Soviet Union (now Russia). Lunar crater Tamm is named after him.

Tamm was a student of Leonid Isaakovich Mandelshtam in science and life.

References

• L. I. Mandelshtam, I. E. Tamm "The uncertainty relation between energy and time in nonrelativistic quantum mechanics", Izv. Akad. Nauk SSSR (ser. fiz.) 9, 122-128 (1945). English translation: J. Phys. (USSR) 9, 249-254 (1945).

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