Pyotr Kapitsa

Pyotr Kapitsa married twice in his life. His first wife and two small children died in the worldwide influenza epidemic of 1918–19. He remarried Anna Alekseevna Krylova, daughter of applied mathematician A.N. Krylov, in 1927. The couple had two sons.

He died on 8 April 1984 at Moscow, Soviet Union. He was 89 at the time of his death.

Pyotr Leonidovich Kapitsa was born on 8 July 1894 in Kronstadt, Russian Empire to parents Leonid Petrovich Kapitsa and Olga Ieronimovna Kapitsa. His father was a military engineer who constructed fortifications while his mother worked in high education and folklore research.

He was studying at A.F. Ioffe's section of the Electromechanics Department of the Petrograd Polytechnical Institute when the World War I broke out and interrupted his studies. He served as an ambulance driver for two years on the Polish front before resuming his studies and graduated in 1918.

Soon he became a lecturer at the Polytechnic Institute where he published several papers. He left the country in 1921 and went to Britain as a member of a scientific mission representing the Soviet Academy of Sciences.

In Britain he met Ernest Rutherford who invited Kapitsa to work in the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge, England. The two men formed a productive partnership, marked by mutual respect and admiration for each other. Kapitsa’s initial experiments were in nuclear physics and he developed techniques for creating ultrastrong magnetic fields by injecting high current for brief periods into specially constructed air-core electromagnets.

He served as Assistant Director of Magnetic Research at Cavendish Laboratory from 1924 to 1932. In 1928 he discovered the linear dependence of resistivity on magnetic field for various metals in very strong magnetic fields. He also served as Director of the Royal Society Mond Laboratory from 1930 to 1934.

His final years at Cavendish were dedicated to low temperature research and he developed a new and original apparatus for the liquefaction of helium based on the adiabatic principle in 1934. The same year he went on a regular visit to Russia but Stalin’s government forbade him from returning to Britain and asked him to continue his work in the Soviet Union.

The scientist protested at being forcibly retained in Russia, but he was appointed director of the specially established Institute of Physical Problems in Moscow in 1935 in an attempt to pacify him. He resumed his work and in the late 1930s he discovered 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)—a phenomenon known as “superfluidity.’

During the World War II Kapitsa was assigned to head the Department of Oxygen Industry attached to the USSR Council of Ministers. In 1939 he developed a new method for liquefaction of air with a low-pressure cycle using a special high-efficiency expansion turbine.

Pyotr Kapitsa discovered superfluidity in liquid helium in 1937. His works in this field ultimately won him the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1978. He also developed a new method for liquefaction of air with a low-pressure cycle using a special high-efficiency expansion turbine.