Pyotr Leonidovich Kapitsa

Pyotr Leonidovich Kapitsa (born June 26 [July 8, New Style], 1894, Kronshtadt, Russian Empire—died April 8, 1984, Moscow, Russia, U.S.S.R.) was a Soviet physicist who invented new machines for the liquefaction of gases and in 1937 discovered the superfluidity of liquid helium. He was a corecipient of the 1978 Nobel Prize for Physics for his basic inventions and discoveries in the area of low-temperature physics.

After a short military service in World War I, Kapitsa resumed his engineering education at the Petrograd Polytechnical Institute, turning to physics in the seminar of Abram Joffe. Before graduation in 1919, he started work at the Petrograd Physico-Technical Institute, a new research institution organized by Joffe after the Russian Revolution of 1917. Kapitsa lost his father, wife, and two small children during the worldwide influenza epidemic of 1918–19. In 1921, when Joffe took him on an academic tour of postwar Europe, Kapitsa remained in England at the University of Cambridge as a research student of Ernest Rutherford. Kapitsa received his doctorate from Cambridge in 1923 and became assistant director of magnetic research at the Cavendish Laboratory. He was made a fellow of Trinity College, University of Cambridge, in 1925 and elected to the Royal Society in 1929. The same year, the U.S.S.R. Academy of Sciences elected Kapitsa a corresponding member. Kapitsa started research in low-temperature physics, and in the Royal Society’s Mond Laboratory, established for him at Cambridge in 1932, he built a new type of helium liquefier based on an expansion turbine.

Britannica Quiz

Physics and Natural Law

During a regular visit to the U.S.S.R in 1934, Kapitsa was told that he would have to continue his work in the Soviet Union. In 1935 he was appointed director of the specially established Institute of Physical Problems in Moscow, where he installed his former equipment from the Mond Laboratory after it was purchased by the Soviet government. He resumed researching the heat-conduction properties of liquid helium, and in 1938 he discovered superfluidity, or the fact that helium II (the stable form of liquid helium below 2.174 K, or −270.976 °C) has almost no viscosity (i.e., resistance to flow). In the meantime, he also invented an apparatus for large-scale industrial production of liquid oxygen. In 1939 he was elected a full member of the Academy of Sciences.

During the precarious years of political purge trials in the Soviet Union, Kapitsa developed ties with several leaders of the government, including Joseph Stalin, to whom he wrote long and sometimes daring personal letters. As one of the politically best-connected Soviet scientists, he managed to secure certain privileges for his institute, advance the industrial application of his inventions, and save several scientists from prison, including two of the nation’s best theoretical physicists, Vladimir Fock and Lev Landau. Landau, who worked as house theoretician at Kapitsa’s institute, developed a quantum theoretical explanation of the phenomenon of superfluidity in 1941. During World War II, Kapitsa became responsible for the entire Soviet industry’s production of liquid oxygen and supervised the construction of large plants based on machines he invented.

In August 1945 the Politburo appointed Kapitsa to the special committee entrusted with the construction of the Soviet atomic bomb. Tensions soon developed between him and the committee’s political chairman, Lavrenty Beria; as a result, Kapitsa fell out of favour with Stalin. By mid-1946 Kapitsa had been dismissed from all of his official appointments, except membership in the Academy of Sciences. After Stalin died in 1953, Beria was ousted by Nikita Khrushchev, who gradually restored Kapitsa’s academic (but not government) positions. In 1955 Kapitsa regained the directorship of the Institute of Physical Problems and kept it until his death.

Having done some original work on ball lightning while he was out of favour with the government, Kapitsa switched from low-temperature physics to high-power microwave generators. Later he also contributed to controlled thermonuclear fusion research. Starting in 1955, he edited the main Soviet periodical in physics, the Journal of Experimental and Theoretical Physics, and from 1957 he was an influential member of the Presidium of the Academy of Sciences.

Kapitsa maintained a visible profile, pushing the boundaries of allowed public speech by his addresses and actions, including support for the temporarily banned field of genetics and the 1960s environmental campaign to preserve Lake Baikal from industrial pollution. While disagreeing with political dissidents, he refused to sign an official letter by the Academy of Sciences condemning physicist Andrey Sakharov. Kapitsa was also active in the international Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs, in which many scientists spoke out against the Cold War and the dangers of thermonuclear conflict.