21 Facts About Igor Kurchatov

Igor Kurchatov was born in a small village in Simsky Zavod in Ufa, Russia, on 12 January 1903.

Igor Kurchatov's father, Vasily Alekseyevich Kurchatov, was a surveyor and former forester's assistant in the Ural Mountains; his mother, Mariya Vasilyevna Ostroumova, a daughter of the parish priest at Sim, was a school teacher.

Igor Kurchatov was the second of three children of Vasily Kurchatov, and the family moved to Simferopol in Crimea in 1912.

Igor Kurchatov attended the Crimea State University where he studied physics and had built a reputation for his mechanical ability to perform physics experiments, for which he was titled as a doctorate.

Igor Kurchatov married Marina Sinelnikova in 1927 and they did not have children.

Between 1931 and 1934, Igor Kurchatov worked in the Radium Institute which was headed by Vitaly Khlopin.

In 1937, Igor Kurchatov was a part of the team that designed and built the first cyclotron particle accelerator in Russia, which was installed in Radium Institute.

Until 1933, Igor Kurchatov did not go into the nuclear physics and his work was primarily focused on electromagnetism but did an important work on nuclear isomer and radioactivity in 1935.

In 1942, Igor Kurchatov was informed of results obtained from Chicago Pile-1 by the Soviet intelligence, and provided his view of making a nuclear bomb.

In 1945, Igor Kurchatov became involved in designing and building the first reactor at Laboratory No 2 which sustained the nuclear chain reaction in late 1946.

In 1947, Igor Kurchatov worked with Isaak Kikoin to verify the calculations of the foreign data received on the American program.

Kurchatov recruited Yulii Khariton and Yakov Zel'dovich, and Kurchatov vigorously defended their deuterium calculations, insisting that the data could not be more accurate on cross section estimates.

The Russian spies in the United States greatly aided in providing the key data on American nuclear devices, which allowed Igor Kurchatov to avoid time-consuming and expensive trial and error problems.

The fissile material was obtained from using the gaseous diffusion and implosion-type plutonium core that Igor Kurchatov spent most of his time on.

Igor Kurchatov later remarked that his main feeling at the time to be one of relief.

Igor Kurchatov aided in calculations but most work was done by Vitaly Ginzburg, Andrei Sakharov, Khariton, and Zel'dovich who had the most credit in developing the design for the thermonuclear device, known as RDS-6, which was detonated in 1953.

In January 1949, Igor Kurchatov was involved in a serious radiation accident which became a catastrophe at Chelyabinsk-40, in which it is possible that even more people died than at Chernobyl.

Igor Kurchatov was cremated and his ashes were buried in the Kremlin Wall Necropolis on Red Square.

Igor Kurchatov was a communist who had a portrait of Stalin by the time he died, and a member of Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

Igor Kurchatov was buried in the Kremlin Wall in Moscow, a burial place reserved for top Soviet officials.

The Igor Kurchatov Medal was established by the Academy of Sciences for outstanding work in nuclear physics.