Pyotr Kapitsa
Soviet physicist
Pyotr Leonidovich Kapitsa (Russian: Пётр Леонидович Капица; Romanian: Petre Capița; 9 July [O.S. 27 June] 1894 – 8 April 1984), also known as Peter Kapitza, was a Russian and Soviet physicist, whose research focused on low-temperature physics. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1978.
Biography
Kapitsa was born on 9 July [O.S. 27 June] 1894, in Kronstadt, Russia, to the Bessarabian Leonid Petrovich Kapitsa (Romanian: Leonid Petrovici Capița), a military engineer who constructed fortifications, and to the Volhynian Olga Ieronimovna Kapitsa, from the Polish noble (szlachta) Stebnicki family. Besides Russian, the Kapitsa family also spoke Romanian.
Kapitsa's studies were interrupted by the First World War, in which he served as an ambulance driver for two years on the Polish Front. He graduated from the Petrograd Polytechnical Institute in 1918. His wife and two children died in the flu epidemic of 1918–1919. He subsequently studied in Britain, working for over ten years with Ernest Rutherford in the Cavendish Laboratory at the University of Cambridge, and founding the influential Kapitza club. He was the first director (1930–1934) of the Mond Laboratory in Cambridge.
In the 1920s, he originated techniques for creating ultrastrong magnetic fields by injecting high current for brief periods into specially constructed air-core electromagnets.
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