Erast Gliner

With sadness we announce the passing of Erast Gliner on 16 November 2021. His 99th birthday would have been on 26 January 2022.

Gliner’s pioneering work was important to contemporary cosmology. Nobel laureate Vitaly Ginzburg praised Gliner’s work in the introduction to Gliner’s review paper¹ , published in Usp. Fiz. Nauk.

In 1965 Gliner² assumed that the pressure in Einstein-Friedmann equationsfor the very early Universe is proportional to the energy density with a negative sign. This unusual relation between pressure and energy density was the first theoretical prediction of dark energy, which existence is now confirmed in observations. In related papers^3–4 Gliner was the first who found the exponentially increasing solution of these equations. With these steps Gliner laid the foundation for cosmology of the Universe with very rapid expansion phase. In the review of cosmology⁵ Starobinsky and Yakov Zeldovich characterized Gliner’s hypothesis of primordial vacuum-like state as a critical condition necessary for inflation. Andrei Sakharov, who considered Gliner’s results of extreme importance, recommended his work³ for publication in Reports of the Russian Academy of Sciences. More detailed cosmological model was built later⁴ .

After Gliner’s principal publications a great variety of inflationary cosmological scenarios has been proposed. Review paper of Erast Gliner¹ outlined the difference between Gliner’s and other scenarios.

After emigrating from the former Soviet Union in 1980 to the US, Gliner worked in cosmology and solar physics at University of Colorado, Boulder, and at the McDonnell Center for the Space Sciences and the Department of Physics at Washington University in St Louis.

References

1. E.B. Gliner Phys. Usp. 45 (2002) 213-220 ; Usp Fis. Nauk (2002) 221-228
2. E.B. Gliner, Sov. Phys. JETP 22, 378 (1965)
3. E.B. Gliner, Dokl. Akad. Nauk USSR 192, 771 (1970)
4. E.B. Gliner and I.G. Dymnikova, Pis. Astron. Zh. 1, 7 (1975)
5. A.A. Starobinsky, Ya. Zeldovich, Sov. Sci. Rev., Sect. E, Vol 6, Part2, p103-104, 1988