Historical overview

All the flags were our guests

Institute Dubna - 1958

Dubna is welcoming the leader of the Arab Revolution, President of the United Arab Republic Abdel Nasser, 13 May, 1958

The Tsar Accelerator had done its job, news of it spread around the globe and Dubna was visited by distinguished guests from all corners of the world. On 27 March, UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjold visited Dubna and exchanged welcoming speeches with JINR Director D.I.Blokhintsev at a gala dinner. On 11 April, IAEA Director General Sterling Cole visited Dubna and a dinner was held in his honor, where Mr. Cole exchanged welcoming speeches with Vice Director Vaclav Votruba. On 13 May, Dubna welcomed the leader of the Arab Revolution and President of the United Arab Republic Abdel Nasser.

On 14 May, Frederic Joliot-Curie that pioneered research into artificial radioactivity visited Dubna. On 29 May, Patrick Blackett that captured traces of the first man-made nuclear reaction visited. On 10 September, the predictor of antiparticles and creator of the "Dirac Sea" Paul Dirac visited Dubna. Adding that he is also a Nobel winner is like saying that Newton is also a physicist. And on 13 November, rounding out the parade of Nobel winners, Director of the Harwell Atomic Energy Centre John Cockcroft visited Dubna as a member of a group of British scientists¹.

I.V.Chuvilo, D.I.Blokhintsev, Paul Dirac, D.V.Efremov, 10 September, 1958	V.P.Dzhelepov, M.G.Meshcheryakov, J.Cockcroft

Against this backdrop, the visit of the author of the novel about physicists "Live with Lightning" (the first Russian edition of the novel was titled "Life in the Dark") Mitchell Wilson was much more modest but for the writer it proved quite fruitful: there he found one of the prototypes for his future work. From the diary of D.I.Blokhintsev, "Mitchell Wilson was in our house... We talked about his work... He told me that he began writing "Life in the Dark" with Hugo Fabermacher; Sabina and Eric came to pick him up..." Three years later, the writer's novel "Meeting on a Distant Meridian" was published almost simultaneously in English and Russian...

Author of the novel "Battle on the Road" Galina Nikolaeva and one of the meeting's initiators A.A.Tyapkin

Following the foreign guests, Moscow's creative intelligentsia blazed a trail to Dubna. We're accustomed to names like Kim, Vizbor, Voznesensky and Vysotsky but they came later. The first were the author of "Battle on the Road" Galina Nikolaeva, the author of "Uncle Stepa" Sergey Mikhalkov and the young poet Evgeny Yevtushenko.

Dubna was currently transformed into a city of the future. In August, construction workers put in commission the Scientists' Club and by the end of the year, the Council of this elite Club had already been elected. A cafe opened at Canteen No.1, offering restaurant-quality service from the very beginning. Regular passenger service between Moscow and the Great Volga began. Dubna Radio began broadcasting. A film crew from the Studio "Kievnauchfilm" captured a historical snapshot of Dubna as an institute in 1958; familiar faces, untouched by time, flicker in the footage of "The Joint Institute for Nuclear Research". And the amateur Film Studio "Dubfilm" released a documentary "They were at the Festival" (directed by Georgy Stoletov). The members of the amateur theater DUST of LHEP presented their first performance. Who hasn't performed on its stage since!

The country handed out awards and titles. "I think I should congratulate the Academy, I've been elected a Corresponding Member," Dmitry Ivanovich wrote in his diary. Bruno Pontecorvo was also elected a Corresponding Member and Corresponding Member V.I.Veksler became an Academician. Gustav Hertz and Georgy Nadzhakov became foreign members of the Academy of Sciences. Lenin Prizes were awarded that year to N.N.Bogolyubov and D.V.Shirkov: Nikolay Nikolaevich - for his original mathematical apparatus for the theory of superconductivity and Dmitry Shirkov - for completing a special assignment while working in Arzamas-16.

UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjold and JINR Director D.I.Blokhintsev. Caption in Dmitry Ivanovich's photo album (handwritten): "He was extremely cautious."

Such is the festive side of the institute's Dubna in 1958. Now, let's take a look at the daily grind. See it through the eyes of the first director. Problem No.1: the Tsar Accelerator. "We had a Scientific Council. It's not fun. V.I. hasn't found the right regime yet..." Dmitry Ivanovich writes in his diary. The same thing a month and a half later: "At KM², they fight for every millisecond. We head catastrophically into zeitnot and twice at that..." CERN breaths down our necks: they build a 25 GeV synchrotron there, scheduled for launch in early 1960³.

Problem No.2 unexpectedly became IBR. Last year, testing on the rig, scheduled for the third quarter of 1957 had to be postponed for a year and today, it's postponed again for another year...

Plans are restructured, deadlines are pushed back. There are many reasons for it and one of them is the bureaucratic procurement system. This is evidenced by the lines from the transcript of the 3rd session of the Scientific Council.

Director of the Laboratory of Nuclear Problems V.P.Dzhelepov, "Professor Wang Ganchang said it had taken him three months to make his camera." Wang Ganchang, "And they haven't even started." V.P.Dzhelepov, "When will the liquefaction station be ready?" V.N.Sergienko, "According to the plan, in the fourth quarter of next year." V.P.Dzhelepov, "Veksler is shaking his head." V.I.Veksler, "How can you not pump when the walls aren't there yet?" V.N.Sergienko, "They've started laying the foundation..."

Foreigners start to complain: the Hungarians don't have enough oranges, the Bulgarians can't find the right meat, there are lines at the stores and they're out of essential small items. This last shortcoming, by the way, was radically resolved: a few years later, a two-story glass building with a sign reading "A thousand little things" appeared on Mir Square, next to Canteen No.1... But that's all nonsense. Yet the fact that foreigners are sometimes barred from here and there because they don't have "clearance"... The fact that they constantly talk about the poor quality of Soviet-made materials... When you leaf through the first director's work logs, covered with dates, names and all sorts of comments, nota bene, you wonder: how did he manage it all? Consider the extent: from raising the city's culture (evicting drunks and hooligans) to obtaining visas for research staff through competent authorities...

Gustav Hertz, D.I.Blokhintsev, Marian Danysh. From Dmitry Ivanovich's photo album with his caption:
"Today at the Council, it's a bit boring..."

A bright, warm spot in the string of events that year, large and small, frustrating and gratifying, was Dmitry Ivanovich's 50th birthday, "...It's somehow difficult to unite this word with itself... Addresses, telegrams, a whole second-hand gift shop remain. They gave me a wonderful prototype of a nuclear power plant and a funny album... I.E.Tamm, my teacher and my enemy, came, too and I realized: I've come to lay down my arms. This is a victory... It's truly wonderful how dreams come true in our country. I dreamed of a theoretical institute, with the Bogolyubov trio, Markov and myself. And this institute is being built! And it will live on! Great!"

I.M.Frank and Princess Brigitte

For Ilya Mikhailovich Frank, the main event of that year was the Nobel Prize awarded to three Soviet physicists "for the discovery and interpretation of the Cherenkov effect" ⁴. Ilya Mikhailovich fondly recalled the days spent in Stockholm. Soviet citizens were a novelty for Scandinavians back then. Their photographs were published in newspapers, they were recognized on the streets; Ilya Mikhailovich wrote that they felt like black sheep against the crowd and after they - he, I.E.Tamm and P.A.Cherenkov had been photographed at the zoo near a cage with polar bears, they felt like polar bears. However, their time in the spotlight was short-lived. Newspaper headlines were once again "occupied by photos of movie stars and reports of murders" and they were no longer recognized on the streets.

And here, for a change, is what preceded the visit to Stockholm (according to P.A.Cherenkov's daughter), "The preparations began with consultations. Era Kalmanovna Guseva, the wife of the Soviet ambassador to Sweden, explained to my mother in detail the dress requirements. Men were to wear tailcoats, women were to wear dresses of a certain length, with a low neckline, only natural jewelry, no fur, even the most expensive. Dresses were not to be repeated at any reception..." They also explained how to behave when communicating with titled persons. It, too, had its own subtleties, everything depended on the title. "At one of the social receptions, my mother showed up without a hat. The high-society hosts and noble guests, of course, pretended not to notice."

To Stockholm for the Nobel Prize. P.A.Cherenkov with his wife, I.M.Frank and I.E.Tamm

Later, Ilya Mikhailovich underlined that without I.E.Tamm, he alone would not have been able to break through the jungle of calculations arising from Maxwell's seemingly simple equations. I.E.Tamm considered his main achievement in physics to be a completely different result and he was somewhat upset that he did not receive the highest prize in physics for it.

Beginning of theoretical calculations and mathematical data processing at JINR on a computer. At the control panel "Ural-1", the employees of the Calculation Sector of the Laboratory of Theoretical Physics, engineer V.V.Fedorin and technician V.V.Sirotin

Notes

¹ In 1932, John Cockcroft and Ernest Walton, using the first linear accelerator they had constructed, achieved the fission of a lithium nucleus into two helium nuclei under the action of accelerated protons and for the first time, experimentally confirmed the formula E = m·c2. Cockcroft was now working on controlled thermonuclear reactions, like Kurchatov and Dubna was not the primary destination of the British delegation's visit. They spent three days at the Kurchatov Institute, where they learnt about the facility "Ogra" (incidentally, its installation was handled by A.V.Chestnoy, formerly, the chief engineer at the GTL) and shared their own results obtained with the ZETA facility.

Kurchatov didn't live to see enthusiasm give way to skepticism, but Cockcroft did. After a lecture, he was asked when research in this area would cause practical results. He said, "In about twenty years." He was reminded that he had said the same thing several years earlier. "As you can see, I do not change my predictions," Cockcroft replied.

² The Veksler accelerator was still called like that.

³ By that time, CERN's first 600 MeV accelerator, constructed in 1957, had already proven its worth: it had discovered the direct decay of the pi meson into an electron and a neutrino.

⁴ In 1934, Pavel Cherenkov, a graduate student of S.I.Vavilov, while studying the luminescence of uranyl salts dissolved in water, noticed the glow of pure water itself when exposed to gamma rays -pure, without any impurities. S.I.Vavilov refused to sign his graduate student's article, but he also submitted his interpretation of this phenomenon to the Reports of the USSR Academy of Sciences: he proposed that its origin is in the bremsstrahlung of electrons knocked out of atoms using gamma rays. However, nature proved more cunning. Carrying out further experiments, P.A.Cherenkov discovered that the radiation was directional and observed at a specific angle. The guess that occurred to I.M.Frank was the basis of the theory developed by him and I.E.Tamm in 1937.

P.A.Cherenkov proposed estimating the kinetic energy of particles based on radiation that resulted in the development of Cherenkov detectors. The significance of this discovery became so obvious that starting in 1952, P.A.Cherenkov was nominated for the Nobel Prize four times and won it for the fifth time. Cherenkov detectors were used not only in nuclear physics, but also in radiotherapy and neutrino astronomy: in 1987, the Cherenkov detector "Kamiokande" registered neutrinos generated by a supernova explosion in the Large Magellanic Cloud.

After the paper of I.M.Frank and I.E.Tamm had been published, they discovered that they were not the first, or even the second. In 1889, Oliver Heaviside found an exact solution to Maxwell's equations for a uniformly moving charge and obtained an unexpected result: at superluminal speeds, the charge should radiate forward and decelerate without any external influence. Fifteen years later, Arnold Sommerfeld arrived at the same result. Verifying this effect was impossible at the time: sources of electrons moving at superluminal speeds only appeared in the 1930s. And after the theory of relativity was formulated in 1905, the predictions of Sommerfeld and Heaviside were largely forgotten.

So, I.M.Frank and I.E.Tamm started from scratch. It's not as if they simply followed Heaviside and Sommerfeld's path. They worked in the opposite direction: not from equations to prediction, but from phenomenon to its cause and this is a thorny path. Moreover, Heaviside (like Sommerfeld) considered charge motion in a vacuum, while Frank and Tamm did so in a dispersion environment, resulting in a somewhat different result. Incidentally, the very fact of radiation initially seemed dubious, since the measuring instrument was the ordinary human eye and the radiation was very weak. Frederic Joliot-Curie, for example, had clearly hinted that after sitting in the dark for a long time, one might see even more than one might imagine.

The developers of the Cherenkov radiation theory learned about Sommerfeld from Academician L.I.Mandelstam after it had already been developed and Professor A.A.Tyapkin discovered Heaviside's article in the early 1970s, while studying the history and prehistory of relativity theory. Ilya Mikhailovich was informed of it by one of his laboratory staff members. Ilya Mikhailovich paused and two days later, said: "It is an honor to have such predecessors."

P.S. The story of Heaviside's prediction and the discovery of Cherenkov radiation is described in detail in B.M.Bolotovsky's book "Oliver Heaviside". I.M.Frank wrote about it in even more detail (excluding the prehistory with Heaviside) in his collection "In Memory of Academician I.E.Tamm". But who would have won the Nobel Prize if S.I.Vavilov had been alive in 1958, let alternative history buffs decide.

Alexander RASTORGUEV