Pavel Cherenkov

He married Maria Putintseva in 1930. She was the daughter of A.M. Putintsev, a Professor of Russian Literature.

The couple was blessed with a son Alexey and a daughter Yelena, both of whom became scientists.

On January 6, 1990, he passed away at the age of 85 years in Moscow and was buried in the cemetery of the city, the ‘Novodevichy Cemetery’.

He was born on July 28, 1904, in the village of Novaya Chigla in southern Russia, to Alexey Cherenkov and Mariya Cherenkova. His parents were peasants.

He lost his mother at around two years of age following which his father remarried. He was raised in poverty along with eight siblings and the impoverished condition of the family led him to take up a manual labour job at thirteen years of age with only two years of elementary education.

Following the Bolshevik Revolution (November 7-8, 1917) and the subsequent civil war, his village got a new Soviet secondary school in 1920, which gave him the opportunity to restart his studies. Side-by-side he occasionally worked at a grocery store to earn a living.

The radical reforms undertaken by the Bolshevik government with regard to the educational system, especially the opportunities made available for the downtrodden students, allowed him to enrol at the ‘Voronezh State University’ without finishing secondary education. He studied in the Department of Physics and Mathematics at the university and completed his graduation in 1928.

Thereafter he started teaching mathematics and physics in an evening school for labourers in the small town of Kozlov (presently Michurinsk) in the Tambov province.

In 1930 he was inducted as a senior researcher in ‘Lebedev Physical Institute’ (commonly abbreviated as ‘FIAN’), of the ‘Russian Academy of Sciences’, Moscow, one of the oldest research institutes in Russia.

There he was assigned by S.I. Vavilov to examine the result of exciting luminescent solutions of uranium salts, not by ordinary light as commonly applied, but by more energetic gamma rays from a radioactive point of supply.

Cherenkov observed a new phenomenon, which differed from that of luminescence, that a faint blue light is produced by gamma rays in generally non-luminescent pure solvents like water and sulphuric acid. His observation in 1934 of the unique form of electromagnetic radiation where he discovered that blue light is being emitted when charged particles like electrons travel with high velocity, faster than light, through a particular medium, proved to be of immense significance for further researches in the fields of cosmic rays and nuclear physics.

Eventually further characteristics of this new form of electromagnetic radiation were unearthed by him that included its particular anisotropy. This aided other theoreticians of ‘FIAN’ namely Ilya Mikhailovich Frank and Igor Yevgenyevich Tamm to elucidate in 1937 the real cause of such phenomenon, which was epithet as the ‘Cherenkov effect’ or ‘Cherenkov radiation’ also called the ‘Vavilov–Cherenkov radiation’.

Not only electrons but any electrically charged particles can generate the effect provided they transmit through a medium with high velocity.

He received the ‘Nobel Prize in Physics’ in 1958 jointly with Igor Tamm and Ilya Frank for discovery of the Cherenkov radiation phenomenon.