Gurgen Askaryan

Gurgen Askaryan (Armenian: Գուրգեն Ասկարյան; Russian: Гурген Аскарьян or Гурген Аскарян) (December 14, 1928 – March 2, 1997) was a prominent Soviet - Armenian physicist, famous for his discovery of the self-focusing of light, pioneering studies of light-matter interactions, and the discovery and investigation of the interaction of high-energy particles with condensed matter. (See Askaryan effect)

Gurgen Askaryan was born in 1928 in Moscow, Russia to Armenian parents. Both parents were doctors: father Ashot Askaryan, was a general practitioner, and his mother Astgik Askaryan was a dentist. At the age of 18 Gurgen entered the Department of Physics at the Moscow State University, where he started his first research project specializing in the physics of atomic nuclei. Graduated in 1952 and was accepted to the graduate school at the Institute of Chemical Physics (ICP) in Moscow. In 1953, he was transferred to the Lebedev Institute of Physics, and graduated with PHD in 1957. An author of over 200 articles, Askaryan made a significant contribution to the field of high energy physics (see Askaryan effect and ANITA (Antarctic Impulsive Transient Antenna)), acoustics, and optics. For his famous discovery of the self-focusing of light, he received the highest scientific award at the time in Soviet Union. Shortly after receiving a degree of the Doctor of Science in 1992, Gurgen experienced health problems, which were also accompanied by worsening of his sister Gohar’s health. He and his sister died the same day on 2 March 1997 in their apartment in Moscow, both because of similar heart disease.

During the third year of his education G. Askaryan proposed a new method of registration of fast charged particles. His idea was the following. Suppose, there is an overheated transparent liquid. A very small amount of energy is sufficient to make it boil. Let a fast charged particle penetrate through this overheated liquid. The particle expends its energy on ionization of atoms located near its trajectory. This energy loss is transformed into heat in amount which is sufficient to induce boiling along particle’s trajectory. Then the trajectory becomes observable because many bubbles are created along it.

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