Vsevolod F. Gantmakher
Prof. DPhil Vsevolod F. Gantmakher
Member of Russian Academy of Sciences
V. F. Gantmakher was born on 8 October, 1935. In 1959 he graduated from Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology and started his scientific career at the P.L.Kapitza Institute for Physical Problems of the USSR Academy of Sciences under the supervision of Yu.V.Sharvin. Having received his PhD, he went to Chernogolovka to work at the newly founded Institute of Solid State Physics of the USSR Academy of Sciences. As the new institute was being built, V. F.Gantmakher continued his work in the laboratories of the Institute for Physical Problems where in 1968 he finished his DPhil thesis Dimensional Effects in Metals. Since 1968 V. F. Gantmakher has been permanently working at the Institute of Solid State Physics where he set up the electron kinetics laboratory which he headed for 30 years.
Since 1964 V. F. Gantmakher has been teaching at Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology and since 2000 at Moscow State University. Since 1990 he has been Chief Editor of Pisma v ZhETF, one of the leading Russian physical journals. In 1997 he was elected a corresponding member of the Russian Academy of Sciences. In the first period of his scientific career V. F. Gantmakher worked in the field of so-called fermiology, researching mainly into electrodynamics of solid state plasma. He found a fundamentally new type of electromagnetic wave penetration into metals in the magnetic field which is an anomalous field and current penetration manifested as a system of “events” in metal depth, namely, extra skin layers, their surface distance determined by typical electron trajectories. Another type of anomalous penetration of electromagnetic field into metal as a standing spiral wave was experimentally found in the magnetic field perpendicular to the metal surface. The phenomenon became known as the Gantmakher-Kaner wave. Those experimental results were summarized in two review papers published in Progr. Low Temp. Phys. 5 (edited by C.J.Gorter, 1967) and Uspekhi Fizicheskhih Nauk (1968, in cooperation with E.A.Kaner). Later the focus of V. F. Gantmakher’s scientific interests shifted to investigation of electron scattering. He measured the probabilities of electron-phonon scattering in tin, bismuth, antimony, tungsten, molybdenum and copper and accounted for the peculiarities of electron-phonon scattering in semimetals. The differential cross-sections of electron scattering on dislocations in copper were also measured. The achievements of that period were reviewed in the book Electron Scattering in Metals and Semiconductors written in cooperation with Y.B.Levinson (Nauka, 1984). In 1987 the book was published in English (North-Holl Publishers).
In subsequent years V. F. Gantmakher investigated low temperature transport in photo-excited semiconductors. Together with V.N.Zverev he discovered a new type of oscillation of the germanium electrical properties in the magnetic field, namely, magneto-impurity oscillations determined by inelastic resonance scattering of carriers on shallow impurity centers. Those results were summarized in the review Landau Level Spectroscopy written in cooperation with V.N.Zverev (edited by G.Landvehr and E.Rashba, North-Holl Publishers, 1991).
In recent years V. F. Gantmakher has been successfully researching into the transport properties of high resistance metal alloys and materials families including high temperature superconductors. In particular, he discovered fractal regularities revealed upon transformation of metastable alloys which resulted in specific Brownian-shaped current channels in the metal-dielectric vicinity. He established the specific role of negative magnetoresistance as an indicator of contribution of one-particle tunneling into the superconducting response in the superconductor-dielectric vicinity.
V. F. Gantmakher has recently proved the existence of magneto-disrupted localized pairs on the dielectric side of the superconductor-dielectric junction