On September 5, a monument to Ilya Frank, physicist, Nobel Prize winner, which he shared with his colleagues Ilya Tamm and Pavel Cherenkov, was solemnly unveiled on the territory of MEPhI. The monument to Ilya Frank completed the Alley of Nobel Laureates of MEPhI.

The opening ceremony of the monument to Ilya Frank

Ilya Frank - Academician of the USSR Academy of Sciences, winner of two Stalin and State Prizes, Director of the Laboratory of Neutron Physics at JINR (Dubna). He graduated from Moscow State University, where he later became a professor, began his scientific activity in the laboratory under the guidance of Sergei Vavilov, then worked at the State Optical Institute (Leningrad), at the Lebedev Physical Institute. He participated in the creation and start-up of the IBR-1 and IBR-2 reactors, the creation of the F-1 nuclear reactor.

In 1958 he won the Nobel Prize for the discovery and interpretation of the Vavilov-Cherenkov effect. The work of Soviet scientists led to the creation of a new method for detecting and measuring the speed of high-energy nuclear particles, which is of great importance in modern experimental nuclear physics.

The monument to the outstanding scientist completed the Alley of Nobel Laureates of MEPhI with the monuments to the physicists Nikolai Basov, Igor Tamm, Andrey Sakharov, Pavel Cherenkov, the chemist Nikolai Semenov, as well as the creators of the Soviet nuclear project - Igor Kurchatov, Yakov Zeldovich and Julius Khariton. All these scientists worked at MEPhI in different years or were involved in the creation of a nuclear university.

MEPhI Rector Vladimir Shevchenko emphasized that the opening of the monument to Frank symbolically takes place in the year of the 80th anniversary of the university: “Ilya Mikhailovich did his job, for which he received the award, when he was not yet 30 years old. And this is a very good example for all of us, once again reminding us that young people do science, even with all the peculiarities and hierarchies of academic communities. I would like our students to see in the heroes of these monuments not “the history of bygone days”, but people with lively thought and energy.”

The guest of honor of the event was the niece of Ilya Frank - Anna Frank, chief researcher of the A.M. Prokhorov Institute of General Physics of Russian Academy of Sciences, laureate of the State Prize of the USSR. On behalf of the Frank family, she thanked the creators of the monument.

Assistant Director of Lebedev FIAN for scientific work, Doctor of Physics and Mathematics, Sergey Savinov recalled that the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1958 was the first prize received by Soviet scientists, and wished that the “Alley of Nobel Laureates would be continued in the next 30 years by new graduates of MEPhI, fortunately there is enough space, and the university has all the necessary qualities for this: the most complex tasks here can be solved in the most modern laboratories.”

The Artplast company, headed by Andrey Novikov, a graduate of MEPhI, took care of all the logistical concerns for the creation of the Alley, and the artistic embodiment of the images of famous scientists belongs to the associate professor of the Surikov Moscow State Art Institute, sculptor Alexander Mironov.

“While working on the monument to Frank, I did not think about prizes - it is rather a kind of background - but about people who gave their lives for the benefit of science, the people, the country. It is no coincidence that the steps that Frank climbs are the stages of the difficult fate of many scientists of that time, not only from discovery to discovery, but also from defeat to success, but always only upwards,” the author of the monument said.