Vladimir Broude

Vladimir L'vovich Broude (December 1, 1924, Moscow, Russia – June 22, 1978, Chernogolovka, Russia), was a Soviet experimental physicist of Jewish descent. His father was a Professor of biochemistry and his mother was a medical doctor. His elder brother Evgenii was conscripted soon after beginning of the Nazi invasion in June 1941 and lost his life.

In 1947 Broude graduated from the Moscow Institute of Chemical Engineering and was directed to Kiev, Ukraine, to the Institute of Physics of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences, for developing and installing equipment for low-temperature optical spectroscopy. Here he developed interest in the low-temperature spectroscopy, studied quantum mechanics and group theory, and very soon became an active and inventive experimental physicist.

In his first break-through papers Broude discovered in the low-temperature spectra of crystalline benzine a triplet of absorption bands strongly polarized along the crystallographic axes. Methodically, this success was only possible thanks to a breakthrough in experimental techniques, the invention of a microprocessor that allowed taking spectra of minor crystallites in polarized light. This experimental result also was of crutial scientific importance because it provided a firm scientific ground for identification strongly polarized absorption bands in the spectra of molecular crystals with exciton multipletes. For these reasons, Broude' papers of the spectra of benzine nearly immediately became the classics.

The next great achievement of Broude was developing a technique for getting the information on energy spectra of excitons in perfect crystals from optical spectra of isotopic solutions. This started with the spectra of dilute solutions in which the giant oscillator strength of impurity excitons was identified and the position of lower energy band of crystalline naphthalene was established. Afterwards the technique was generalized to exciton spectra of mixed crystals in a wide range of concentrations. This resulted in the discovery of the multimode regime in the impurity-exciton bands of disordered systems. Isototic technique initiated by Broude found application in investigations of energy transport in biological systems.

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