Abrikosov, Alexei Alekseyevich

Abrikosov, Alexei Alekseyevich,

1928–2017, Russian-American physicist, Ph.D. Institute for Physical Problems, USSR Academy of Sciences, 1951. Abrikosov was a researcher at the Institute, then from 1965 to 1988 he was a department head at the Landau Institute, USSR Academy of Sciences; from 1988 to 1991 he was director of the Institute of High Pressure Physics. He also was a professor at Moscow State Univ. from 1951 to 1976. Abrikosov became a researcher at Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois in 1991, working there until 2016, and was leader (1992–2000) of Argonne's condensed matter theory group. In 2003 Abrikosov was a co-recipient, with Vitaly GinzburgGinzburg, Vitaly Lazarevich,
1916–2009, Russian physicist, Ph.D. Moscow State Univ., 1938. He was a researcher at Lebedev Physics Institute of the USSR (later Russian) Academy of Sciences after 1940.
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 and Anthony LeggettLeggett, Sir Anthony James,
1938–, British physicist, Ph.D. Oxford, 1964. He was a professor at Sussex Univ., England, from 1967 to 1983, when he joined the faculty at the Univ. of Illinois at Urbana Champaign.
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, of the Nobel Prize in Physics for making pioneering contributions to the theory of superconductors (see superconductivitysuperconductivity,
abnormally high electrical conductivity of certain substances. The phenomenon was discovered in 1911 by Heike Kamerlingh Onnes, who found that the resistance of mercury dropped suddenly to zero at a temperature of about 4.
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). In the 1950s Abrikosov developed a theory to explain how a certain class of superconductors, known as Type II, are superconductive and magnetic at the same time and how they remain superconductive in high magnetic fields. Type II superconductors are the most important superconductors technologically, and are used in MRI machines, particle accelerators, and other devices.