Obituary of Oleg Aleksandrovich Lavrentyev

Oleg Aleksandrovich Lavrentyev, born July 7, 1926, died on February 10, 2011. As a boy he read a book about nuclear physics that inspired him to learn more, but World War II intervened. He had only an eighth grade education when he enlisted as a soldier in the Soviet Army, where he served as a radioman in the signal corps. After the war he was stationed on Sakhalin Island, north of Japan. There he found some books on math, physics, and chemistry in a library and educated himself. He heard about the atomic bomb and the effort to develop a hydrogen bomb. In 1950 he boldly wrote a letter to the Kremlin stating that he knew how to make an H-bomb. He proposed to use lithium-6 deuteride, which would make tritium and facilitate deuterium-tritium fusion reactions. They sent an officer to his post to interrogate him, and he was given two weeks to write an essay on his ideas. He also proposed to make a nuclear fusion reactor for peaceful applications using spherical electrostatic grids to accelerate and confine plasma. This essay was given to Andrei Dmitrievich Sakharov for review, and the review was positive. Sakharov and Igor Yevgenyevich Tamm were thereby inspired to consider the use of magnetic fields for fusion reactors. At Moscow State University Lavarentyev undertook an accelerated program. Lavrentiy Pavlovich Beria, Head of the Secret Police, was in charge of the nuclear weapons program, from which an apartment and tutor were provided to Lavrentyev. When Lavrentyev was about to graduate in 1953, Stalin died, and the despised Beria was executed. Then Lavrentyev was ostracized, because people mistakenly associated him with Beria. He was not given the promised job at the Laboratory that later became the Kurchatov Institute, where nuclear weapons were under development. He managed to get a position at the Physical-Technical Institute in Kharkov, Ukraine, where he remained for his whole career. There he built small electromagnetic trap plasma confinement devices that used magnetic cusps with electrostatic plugging. He showed that the desired potential well was produced and that electron diffusional losses were nearly classical. He was about to get funding for a larger machine when his supervisor A. A. Kalmykov died, and the funding was lost. Lavrentyev continued his research on a low budget, developing his theory and experiments further, but never received the financial support that he deserved. He also proposed a mechanism for converting electron thermal energy directly into electricity and verified it at low currents. He is author or co-author of over 100 scientific articles and 30 inventions. In 2003 he was awarded the Honored Worker in Science and Technology of Ukraine, and in 2004, the K. D. Sinelnikov Prize of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences for excellence in plasma physics. Dr. Lavrentyev has rightly been considered as one of the founding fathers of Soviet fusion research.