Their names are in the history of science

A bright trace in science and in the memory of colleagues

6 April marked the 110th anniversary of the birth of the outstanding Soviet physicist Fyodor Shapiro (1915-1973), Corresponding Member of the USSR Academy of Sciences, winner of the USSR State Prize in Science and Technology, Deputy Director of the Laboratory of Neutron Physics. His name is inscribed in the history of the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research, the memory of his work with him is carefully preserved and passed on to new generations by JINR veterans.

During his relatively short life, Fyodor Shapiro managed to leave a bright trace in science and in the memory of his colleagues. His proposed techniques, research areas and experimental equipment allowed several generations of physicists to obtain scientific results of international standard in various scientific centres.

The fate was such that Fyodor Shapiro came to science late. He left school very early, at the age of 15 and due to his age, he could not enter a higher education institution. He started to study at the G.M.Krzhizhanovsky Power Engineering College of the All-Russian Energy Organization and at the same time to work, helping his family. During his studies, he proposed an original technique of converting thermal energy into electrical energy and was awarded a copyright certificate for this invention. In 1935, after having graduated from the Power Engineering School, Fyodor Shapiro joined the Design Organization "Tsentroelektromontazh", where he was engaged in the development of complex electric drives and automatics. In parallel, he was actively interested in physics and nuclear physics, in particular. In 1936, he became a student of the Physics Department of Moscow State University.

Fyodor Shapiro studied brilliantly at the university and graduated with honors on 21 June, 1941. The next day, he and his fellow students met in the queue of volunteers at the military enlistment office. He was not immediately taken into the army because of his work in the JSC "Tsentroelectromontazh" and his friends were killed in the first battles of the Moscow militia. He applied to the military enlistment office several times, but only on 16 October, 1941, when the German troops approached the suburbs of Moscow, he finally managed to get sent to the front. He fought in reconnaissance, was seriously wounded, saving a wounded fellow soldier. He was awarded the medal "For bravery", was treated in the hospital for a long time and in April, 1942, was discharged with a shrapnel near the heart that the doctors did not dare to extract. He went to work again, in order to live in hungry Moscow himself and to help his family that was in evacuation. And only two years later, fate unexpectedly brought him back to science.

He accidentally met E.L.Fabelinsky, an employee of the Lebedev Physical Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences (LPI RAS) that remembered Fyodor Shapiro as an able student and helped him to enter the graduate school with Ilya Frank that headed the Laboratory of Atomic Nuclei at LPI. At the same time, Fyodor Shapiro continued to work at Elektroprom to support his family. In 1946, he became an assistant at the Department of Nuclear Physics at Moscow State University, headed by I.M.Frank, where in a short time, Shapiro constructed a workshop on nuclear physics with his own hands. A year later, Fyodor Shapiro was employed as a junior researcher (at the age of 32!) at LPI, where he began to study deep subcritical uranium-graphite assemblies. In 1949, he defended a closed PhD thesis on these papers and afterwards, continued active work on implementation of the technique of neutron spectroscopy by deceleration time in lead. On this spectrometer, the effect of deviation of the radiation capture cross section of neutrons by nuclei from the 1/v law that seemed universal at that time, was observed for the first time. Even L.D.Landau took this result at face value but later, it became universally recognized and was included in textbooks. In addition, Fyodor Shapiro developed a technique of unsteady neutron diffusion in the multigroup approximation. These papers were highly appreciated and were successfully presented at the Geneva Conference on the Peaceful Uses of Atomic Energy in 1955.

The last 15 years of Fyodor Shapiro's life inseparably concern JINR and Dubna, where he was attracted by I.M.Frank that had established a laboratory for neutron research "in a clean field" since 1957. F.L.Shapiro not only developed the scientific programme of research at the IBR reactor under construction, but also gathered a creative team for its implementation and brought up a group of like-minded people. In addition to the first investigations on neutron nuclear physics, Fyodor L.Shapiro initiated the beginning of research in condensed matter physics on IBR. He proposed a technique of inverse geometry that has a large luminosity and allows studying subtle effects of the structure of solids and liquids. F.L.Shapiro, together with a colleague from Poland, B.Buras, proposed and subsequently developed a technique of inverse geometry. Buras proposed and later widely used the time-of-flight technique for diffraction investigations of the structure of matter. With his direct participation, the technique of neutron diffraction on structures in strong pulsed magnetic fields was implemented.

In 1964, the technique of neutron polarization proposed by F.L.Shapiro using the passage of neutrons through a polarized proton target was successfully implemented on one of the neutron beams of IBR. It allowed obtaining polarized neutrons with energies up to a dozen kilovolts, with the help of which intensive pioneering research of spin-spin interactions, neutron scattering amplitudes on the deuteron and spatial parity violation effects in the interaction of neutrons with nuclei, including radiation capture and nuclear fission, were carried out from the 1960s to the 1990s. These investigations have obtained well-deserved recognition and have become a trademark of the Laboratory of Neutron Physics.

In the same 1964, Fyodor Shapiro initiated the development of a new more powerful pulsed reactor IBR-2 at FLNP that was put into operation in 1984 and successfully operates today.

In April 1968, in a paper published in the journal "Advances in physical sciences", F.L.Shapiro proposed a new precision technique for the experimental verification of the fundamental law of time reversal. For this purpose, he recommended to measure the neutron dipole moment using very slow neutrons traveling at speeds of 5-8 m/s that in principle, could be accumulated in a trap. These ultracold neutrons (UCNs), the fraction of which in the Maxwellian thermal spectrum of reactors is 10^-12, had to be detected. As a result, the record-breaking pioneering experiment was successfully implemented at the IBR reactor by a group of young researchers under his direct supervision. A few years later, the discovery of UCNs was officially registered, the use of which for fundamental and applied research triumphantly continues to the present day.

F.L.Shapiro lectured at Moscow State University. His lectures were characterized by clarity of presentation and depth of the delivered matter. In 1965, he became a professor and in 1968, he was elected a corresponding member of the USSR Academy of Sciences. It was a well-deserved recognition of his merits in fundamental nuclear physics and in the investigation of the structure of matter.

Several documentary films have been made about Fyodor Shapiro and a collection of his scientific papers has been prepared and published. A sculptural composition "I.M.Frank and F.L.Shapiro" stands at the central entrance to the administrative building of the Laboratory of Neutron Physics and at the beginning of the alley named after him. The brightest scientific achievements of young employees of FLNP are annually recognized and encouraged by the F.L.Shapiro Scholarship.

As reported by FLNP