- Person
- Alexei Abrikosov
- Lived
- 1928–2017
- Field
- Theoretical physics
- From
- Russian-American
The story
Alexei Abrikosov was born in Moscow in 1928 to two physicians; his mother, Fanny Wulf, was Jewish. A student of the great theorist Lev Landau, he spent most of his career at Soviet institutes before moving in 1991 to Argonne National Laboratory near Chicago.
Superconductors carry electric current with no resistance when cooled close to absolute zero, and they push magnetic fields out. The simplest kind, type I, loses its superconductivity in fairly weak magnetic fields, which makes it useless for powerful magnets. In the early 1950s, testing the superconductivity theory of Vitaly Ginzburg and Landau with the experimentalist Nikolai Zavaritskii, Abrikosov identified a second group of superconductors that behaved differently. Experimenters in the 1930s had already seen alloys that let magnetic field in gradually while staying superconducting, but had blamed impure samples.
Using the Ginzburg-Landau equations, Abrikosov explained what was happening in a paper published in 1957. In these type-II superconductors, magnetic field threads through the material in thin tubes, each carrying one quantum of magnetic flux and surrounded by circulating supercurrents, like tiny whirlpools. The rest of the material stays superconducting. As the field grows, the vortices crowd into a regular pattern, the Abrikosov vortex lattice, until their cores overlap and superconductivity ends. His theory matched the old measurements, and about ten years later experimenters made the lattice visible.
Type-II superconductors are the technically important kind because they stay superconducting in strong magnetic fields. The Nobel committee noted that the strong superconducting magnets used for magnetic resonance imaging are all type-II, and that Abrikosov’s description is still used to develop and analyse new superconductors and magnets. Most MRI systems use wire of niobium-titanium, a type-II superconductor, and the magnets of CERN’s Large Hadron Collider contain about 1,200 tonnes of niobium-titanium cable. Abrikosov shared the 2003 Nobel Prize in Physics with Ginzburg and Anthony Leggett.
Why it matters
Abrikosov’s theory explains the superconducting magnets inside MRI scanners that help doctors examine patients without X-rays, and inside the accelerators of modern physics.
About Alexei Abrikosov
Moscow-born theorist who explained type-II superconductors, the materials in the magnets of every MRI scanner and of particle accelerators such as the Large Hadron Collider. Nobel Prize 2003.
Sources
- Popular information: The Nobel Prize in Physics 2003 NobelPrize.org
- Alexei A. Abrikosov, Biographical NobelPrize.org
- Niobium–titanium Wikipedia
- Alexei Abrikosov (physicist) Wikipedia
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