17 Facts About Yakov Frenkel

Yakov Il'ich Frenkel was a Soviet physicist renowned for his works in the field of condensed-matter physics.

Yakov Frenkel is known as Jacov Frenkel, frequently using the name J Frenkel in publications in English.

Yakov Frenkel was born to a Jewish family in Rostov on Don, in the Don Host Oblast of the Russian Empire on 10 February 1894.

Yakov Frenkel's father was involved in revolutionary activities and spent some time in internal exile to Siberia; after the danger of pogroms started looming in 1905, the family spent some time in Switzerland, where Yakov Frenkel began his education.

Yakov Frenkel considered moving to the USA but was nevertheless admitted to St Petersburg University in the winter semester of 1913, at which point any emigration plans ended.

From 1921 till the end of his life, Yakov Frenkel worked at the Physico-Technical Institute.

Yakov Frenkel was the author of the first theoretical course in the Soviet Union.

Yakov Frenkel served as a visiting professor at the University of Minnesota in the United States for a short period of time around 1930.

Early works of Yakov Frenkel focused on electrodynamics, statistical mechanics and relativity, though he soon switched to the quantum theory.

Yakov Frenkel enthusiastically entered the field through discussions but his first scientific paper on the matter was published in 1927.

The Yakov Frenkel defect became firmly established in the physics of solids and liquids.

In 1930 to 1931, Yakov Frenkel showed that neutral excitation of a crystal by light is possible, with an electron remaining bound to a hole created at a lattice site identified as a quasiparticle, the exciton.

In 1934, Yakov Frenkel outlined the formalism for the multi-configuration self-consistent field method, later rediscovered and developed by Douglas Hartree.

Yakov Frenkel later developed a microscopic model, similar to the Schottky effect, to explain Poole's results more accurately.

Yakov Frenkel cited Poole's paper when he wrote a longer article in a Soviet journal.

Yakov Frenkel was involved in the studies of the liquid phase, too, since the mid-1930s and during the World War II, when the institute was evacuated to Kazan.

Yakov Frenkel subsequently worked mainly in the field of atmospheric effects, but did not abandon his other interests, publishing several papers in nuclear physics.