Artem Alikhanian

Artem Alikhanian Արտեմ Ալիխանյան
Alikhanian in 1948
Born	(1908-06-24)24 June 1908 Elizavetpol
Died	25 February 1978(1978-02-25) (aged 69) Moscow
Citizenship	Soviet
Nationality	Armenian
Fields	physics
Institutions	Yerevan Physics Institute
Alma mater	Leningrad State University
Notable awards	Lenin Prize (1970) USSR State Prizes (1941, 1948) Order of the Red Banner of Labour (2)

Artem Isahaki (Isaakovich) Alikhanian (Armenian: Արտեմ Ալիխանյան, Russian: Артём Исаакович Алиханьян, 24 June 1908 – 25 February 1978) was a Soviet Armenian physicist, one of the founders and first director of the Yerevan Physics Institute, a correspondent member of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR (1946), academic of the Armenian Academy of Sciences. With Pyotr Kapitsa, Lev Landau, Igor Kurchatov, Abraham Alikhanov and others, he laid the foundations of nuclear physics in the Soviet Union. He is known as the "father of Armenian physics".

Artem Alikhanian was born in Elizavetpol, Russian Empire, to an Armenian family of a railway engineer and homemaker. They had four children: two sons (the elder, Abraham Alikhanov, became a well-known physicist) and two daughters. In 1912 the family moved to Aleksandropol. He worked as a waiter and a newspaper seller. Alikhanian did not attend school regularly; initially he was mostly schooled at home but later he received an external degree from Tiflis school № 100. In 1930, before he graduated from Leningrad State University, he became a staff-member at Leningrad Physico-Technical Institute working together with his elder brother Abraham Alikhanov. The work of their group was devoted to the investigation of pair production and of the resultant positron spectrum. For observation of positrons, Alikhanov, his student M. Kozodaev and Alikhanian used an original combination of a magnetic spectrometer and two contiguous Geiger-Müller counters making coincidence counts. This work became a starting point for the application of radio engineering to experimental nuclear physics in the Soviet Union. Before World War II, they carried out fundamental investigations of beta-decay, discovered the internal conversion of gamma rays and confirmed experimentally the energy conservation in positron annihilation. In 1934 their research group (B. Dzhelepov, Alikhanov and Alikhanian) was among the pioneers observing the phenomenon of radioactive decay. A method of determining the rest mass of the neutrino, using decay of the nuclei of Be7, was suggested by Alikhanov and Alikhanian in 1938. For their investigations both brothers (without being Communist party members) were awarded the USSR State Prize.