Alexei Abrikosov and other members of the Theoretical Division of the Institute of Physical Problems, 1956. From left to right in the front row: Abrikosov, I. M. Khalatnikov, L. D. Landau, and E. M. Lifshits; and in the back row: S. S. Gershtein, L. P. Pitaevskii, L. A. Vainshtein, R. G. Arkhipov, and I. E. Dzyaloshinskii.
Source: Courtesy of Boris Gorobets, Moscow.
Alexei A. Abrikosov (1928– ) was born into an elite Russian family and received the best possible training in Lev Landau’s theoretical physics school. He had the ability to communicate with experimentalists and early on made important discoveries about superconductors. He was elected in his thirties to be corresponding member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, but then had to wait over two decades to become a full member. His marriage to a French woman—his second wife—made him suspect in the eyes of the authorities. His third marriage brought stability to his life.
Abrikosov was active in the communist youth movement but never became a party member. His father, a famous pathologist, talked him out of joining the party based on his own bitter experience. Abrikosov was half-Jewish, which almost prevented him from getting the job he desired. He was also not allowed into classified nuclear weapons work because he had an uncle who lived in the West.
Abrikosov emigrated to the United States when the Soviet Union was dissolved. When he received the Nobel Prize, he declared that he was first and foremost an American.
Alexei Alexeevich Abrikosov was born on June 25, 1928, in Moscow. His parents were medical doctors, pathologists. His father was Russian and his mother Jewish; her name was Fanny Davidovna Wul’ff. This did not make Abrikosov Jewish, as he would be considered according to Judaism, because in Russia the father was the determining factor for one’s nationality (religious denomination was not registered whereas being Jewish was counted among nationalities). So Abrikosov was Russian, and only when his family background was investigated did his mother become a consideration—as happened when he finished his doctoral studies. Abrikosov had been Lev Landau’s pupil at the Institute of Physical Problems (Institut Fizicheskikh Problem [IFP]). Landau recognized Abrikosov’s talent, and wanted to keep him in his group after graduation. This was in the very early 1950s. The director of IFP, A. P. Aleksandrov (Petr Kapitza was in exile) did not object to Abrikosov’s appointment. However, the local representative of Lavrentii Beria’s Interior Ministry responsible for security matters decided that Abrikosov was not to be trusted. As a pretext, the anti-nepotism rule was cited, referring to Landau’s patronymic, Davidovich, and to the patronymic of Abrikosov’s mother, Davidovna, as if this were evidence of their being closely related.
Abrikosov went to work at the Institute of the Physics of Earth and completed a good piece of theoretical research about the internal structure of Jupiter. However, an independent event unexpectedly changed his fortune. I heard this story from Abrikosov himself.1 Later I was told it repeatedly by Russian colleagues whenever Abrikosov’s name came up in conversations. It has become part of the folklore. In 1952, the Stalinist leader of Mongolia, Khorloogiin Choibalsan, was visiting the Soviet Union. He arrived gravely ill and died in Moscow. One of the signatories of the medical report of his death was Abrikosov’s mother. The communication was printed in Pravda, the principal newspaper of the Communist Party, and received wide publicity. The fact that she had been allowed to perform the autopsy of this most important leader greatly impressed the representative of the Interior Ministry. He changed his mind about Abrikosov being employed by the IFP, and Abrikosov was duly transferred there. One of Abrikosov’s colleagues at the IFP, the future academician Aleksandr Shalnikov, suggested to Abrikosov that he express his gratitude by hanging a portrait of Choibalsan in coffin on the wall of Abrikosov’s office.
By the time Abrikosov joined the IFP in 1952, many of its activities had been transformed into nuclear-weapons-related research. Landau at this time was a full-fledged member of this project, and he wanted to involve Abrikosov, who was ready to join. Six decades later, however, Abrikosov appeared happy remembering that he had never participated in any weapons-related project.2 It was, again, due to interference by the security organs that he was not allowed to join the project. Abrikosov learned the reason only decades later.
Abrikosov’s father had a younger brother about whom the family never spoke, and Abrikosov grew up without knowing that he had an uncle. This uncle, Dmitrii Abrikosov, was a diplomat under the czarist government, and in 1917, when the revolution broke out, he was serving at the Imperial Russian Embassy in Japan, first as a member of the embassy staff, later becoming the acting ambassador. Japan had not yet recognized the Soviet state. When Japan recognized the Soviet government, Dmitrii Abrikosov had to leave his post. He never returned to the Soviet Union. He became a private citizen and stayed in Japan until the end of World War II. He then moved to the United States, but did not live for a long time after. He left behind a manuscript, which was deposited in the Archival Collections of the Columbia University Libraries. The first part of his manuscript was published under the title Revelations of a Russian Diplomat,3 after a historian researcher discovered it in the archives. When Abrikosov eventually had the opportunity to read the memoirs, he found them fascinating. The security organs had known that Abrikosov had an uncle abroad long before Abrikosov learned about his existence.
Although Kapitza was in internal exile, even in his absence his principal research interest—superfluidity and superconductivity—was kept alive at the IFP. These areas became Abrikosov’s topics of theoretical investigation in Landau’s group.4 Abrikosov had a good career in Soviet science, but he thought his career could have been better had he not married a French woman in 1970. The story of this marriage—not terribly remarkable under ordinary circumstances, though it was under the Soviet regime—has also become part of the folklore.
It was Abrikosov’s second marriage. He had divorced his first wife after twenty years of marriage. They had one son. He met his future second wife during a conference in India, where a French colleague arrived with his beautiful wife. She came from a mixed French-Vietnamese family; her father was a college professor with a dominating personality. His daughter, Anni, wanted to gain her independence by marrying early. Alas, she did not feel independent enough even in her marriage. She may have been overshadowed by her husband, or may have felt confined for other reasons.
After getting to know each other in India, Anni and Abrikosov next met in 1968 in the Soviet Union, during a French-Soviet meeting of theoretical physicists in the the Caucasian Mountains. One of the social programs was hiking. Abrikosov participated, but Anni’s husband did not. Abrikosov and Anni reached the summit first, and Abrikosov wrote a complimentary remark about her in the journal placed there in which the conquerors of the summit could leave comments. She was much moved by his compliments. The next year they met in Paris, where Abrikosov had traveled on business, and on that occasion they decided to marry.
To do the necessary paperwork, Abrikosov had to extend his stay in Paris, and this was not taken lightly by the Soviet Embassy. The Soviet officials implied that he was a traitor to his Fatherland. Abrikosov issued an ultimatum: either his stay was legally extended or he would not return to the Soviet Union at all. When the embassy people told him that this was not the proper way to repay the tuition-free education he had received in the Soviet Union, he responded: “I also taught there for many years.”5 Soon, a compromise was reached and Abrikosov traveled back to the Soviet Union together with Anni. Upon his return, he was put into quarantine as far as foreign travel, especially to the West, was concerned. In 1975, he was allowed to visit Finland, but Finland was a special country. Although it was part of the West, Finland had signed an agreement with the Soviet Union stipulating that if Soviet citizens in Finland wanted to stay out of their country, Finland would force them to return to the Soviet Union.
Abrikosov’s second marriage produced another son. The marriage lasted seven years. Unfortunately, Anni did not find independence under the conditions of Soviet life, although she learned Russian quickly. She became homesick for France and her former family, and when she went back for a visit, she never returned. Eventually, Abrikosov married his third wife. They have been married for thirty-seven years as of 2013. They had one daughter who went to college in the United States, graduated from medical school, and became a physician.
Returning to the subject of Abrikosov’s career, he defended his higher doctorate in 1955. In 1964, he was elected corresponding member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, and in 1987, he was elected full member. In 1966, Abrikosov, Vitaly L. Ginzburg, of the Lebedev Institute of Physics of the Academy of Sciences (Fizicheskii Institut Akademii Nauk [FIAN]), and Lev P. Gorkov, also of the IFP (as Abrikosov was), were jointly awarded the Lenin Prize “for the theory of superconductivity in strong magnetic fields.” The Lenin Prize was a very high recognition in the former Soviet Union. It was different from the State Prize (previously called the Stalin Prize), of which one could receive several. The Lenin Prize could only be received once.
At this time, both Landau and Kapitza were alive, but Landau had already been injured in a car accident in 1962, and he was no longer a factor in scientific life. Kapitza had changed the direction of his research after he returned from internal exile in 1954. Abrikosov, Ginzburg, and Gorkov—all three independent researchers—continued what Kapitza and Landau had started. When in 1965 the theoreticians of IFP moved away to form a new institute, Abrikosov and Gorkov both followed. The new institute became the L. D. Landau Institute of Theoretical Physics of the Soviet (later Russian) Academy of Sciences. There, Abrikosov became head of one of the divisions. Abrikosov’s Soviet career was capped in 1988 by his appointment to director of the High Pressure Physics Institute in Troitsk, Moscow Region. He stayed in this position for three years before he emigrated to the United States.
In 1991, the three Lenin Prize winners, Abrikosov, Ginzburg, and Gorkov, were jointly awarded the Bardeen Prize, making them the first recipients of the award. The Bardeen Prize was established to commemorate John Bardeen, the only two-time winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics. Its principal sponsor is the physics department of the University of Illinois, and it is a coveted international recognition.
In 1992, Gorkov, also a full member of the Russian Academy of Sciences, also immigrated to the United States. He became a leading scientist of the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory at Florida State University in Tallahassee. Although, like Abrikosov, Gorkov had become a US citizen and a member of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States, he has remained in active contact with the Russian Academy and the Landau Institute. It must have been a great disappointment to Gorkov in 2003 that he was left out of the Nobel Prize in Physics, of which his former co-awardees of the Lenin Prize and the Bardeen Prize were co-recipients with Anthony Leggett of the University of Illinois. Both Abrikosov and Ginzburg were puzzled by Gorkov’s absence in the Nobel Prize announcement.
When Abrikosov was a young man, he was a member of the Communist Youth Organization (Komsomol), as almost everybody was in his generation, and without which one could not get a higher education.6 He was exceptionally active and successful in the movement. His assignment was to talk with people at election times to make sure that everybody went to vote. It was a meaningless exercise, because the 99.9 percent majority was assured in the Soviet-style uncontested elections with one-candidate for one-place, but still, people had to participate to maintain the appearance of democracy. Abrikosov was an “agitator,” and he was good at it. He was soon promoted to so-called propagandist. This was, in fact, adult education, and Abrikosov had to teach the history of the Soviet Communist Party to grown-ups; this was to a large extent Stalin’s biography. To facilitate learning, he found some books for his “pupils” to read, and at study sessions they would discuss these books. When the regional party people did inspections, they were pleased by the progress of Abrikosov’s group and by the way he conducted the training. They decided to further elevate him, and he was appointed deputy party secretary for propaganda. This was a strange state of affairs, because Abrikosov was not even a party member. The solution to the problem seemed obvious; they decided that Abrikosov should join the party. Although Abrikosov did everything with enthusiasm, at this point he cooled his heels, and decided to seek his father’s advice.7
Alexei Abrikosov Senior was a well-known scientist, full member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, and the vice president of the Soviet Academy of Medicinal Sciences. He was best known for having performed the autopsies of Lenin and Stalin. He was charged with embalming Lenin’s body, which is still on display in the Lenin Mausoleum. At the age of sixty-five, he became a party member, and his son wondered why he had waited so long, and what had made him finally join the Party.
Abrikosov described his situation to his father, and asked for advice. He told his father that it was his intention to join the party, because it was the ruling party (there was no other party) and, of course, he believed, as everybody else did, that this system would last forever. He told his father that he was afraid that if he did not join, the party would fall into the hands of some nasty people. To him at that moment, it seemed to be his duty to join.
The father said, “Do you understand that joining the party means that you would become a soldier of the party?” Abrikosov was prepared for that. Then the old man said, “You probably don’t know what it really means. Do you know how I resigned from my position as director of the Institute of Morphology, which I’d created myself?” Abrikosov thought that his father had resigned because he was old and sick, but his father contradicted him: “It was nothing like that. One day I was called to the regional party committee and I was asked whether I knew that all nationalities in the Soviet Union were equal. Of course, I did. Then they told me that half of the co-workers in my Institute were Jewish, whereas in the whole population the Jews amounted to a few percent only. They told me that this situation was unjust to the other nationalities and that I should correct the situation.” This story is consistent with what we have learned since about the brutal anti-Semitic campaign in the Soviet Union during the last years of Stalin’s life.
By then, Abrikosov’s father had been a party member for some time. When he joined, he did not think much of it, and he had an easy-going nature, so when he was invited, he complied. It was before Stalin’s anti-Semitic policies were begun. Abrikosov’s father never openly revolted, and he did not at this time either, but he did not take any action. When he was called the second time, he explained to the party people that he had examined the files of all his collaborators and found no excuse to let any of them go. They were very good, and they had to be, because that was his criteria for hiring them in the first place. The party people told him that if he could not take action, they would do it themselves. The old man went home and wrote his resignation. He told his son that he must be prepared for such things if he became a party member. Abrikosov immediately understood that he would not become one.
However, he had to find a good excuse to decline the invitation to join the party. He came up with a shrewd explanation: “I told them that when I am doing something, I am doing it with zest. If I would join the Party, I would make a very successful career in the Party even if I had no intention of doing so. That would mean that eventually I would have to give up science. I felt—I told them—that I was at a branching point and it was at this point that I had to stop.”8
Abrikosov was never entirely happy living in the Soviet Union, and he was not satisfied with Gorbachev’s policy of perestroika (“restructuring”) either: “I understood that under the pretext of perestroika, they were destroying the socialist economy without replacing it with something else. I anticipated that the first victim of the situation would be basic science.”9 By then he was the director of the Institute of High Pressure Physics. To ease the difficult economic situation of his institute, Abrikosov had tried to establish industrial connections. He thought that the institute could produce and sell diamond instrumentation for industry. He wanted these activities to be legitimate but could not legalize them because private enterprise was still frowned upon, officially, that is. At the same time, Abrikosov saw some of his friends moving to America and becoming successful there, so he decided to follow them. He did not feel it to be a great sacrifice to give up his position of director because, as he put it, “My reputation was always based on my science and not on my position.”10
He observed an all-around deterioration in the most diverse areas of life and activities in the Soviet Union. If the country had always been a paper tiger in the sense of the economy but a giant in selected areas of the sciences, among them nuclear weaponry and the space program, it was on its way to also becoming a paper tiger in those areas. The earlier Soviet advantage had disappeared, and the United States prevailed. According to Abrikosov, the arms race and programs like the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) contributed to the collapse of the Soviet Union. He no longer saw a future for himself in what had already become Russia. He was in his early sixties when he started thinking seriously about moving to the United States.
Alexei Abrikosov (on the right) and Lev Landau (on the left) with two foreign visitors between them, in Moscow.
Source: Courtesy of Boris Gorobets, Moscow.
One of his concerns was how to get a good job at such an age in America. Another was how his colleagues would view his departure. In this regard, he thought the sooner he left, the better because with the situation further deteriorating, they would try to prevent him from leaving by exercising moral pressure. This was no trivial matter because his appointment to the directorship had been preceded by a democratic election at the institute; he became director by popular demand. Thinking about the move toward the very end of the 1980s, he wanted to take his future into his own hands, and for this, he first wanted to visit the United States.
Following his second marriage, he was never let out of the country to travel to the West. He used to have a big map of the world in his office on which all the cities from which he had received invitations were marked with little flags, to which he had never been permitted to go. Now he went directly to the secret police, the KGB, and requested that they let him travel. It is not known what he told them, but he received permission; probably the KGB was also sensing the changes and might have been impressed by Abrikosov’s determination as well as his position. On his visit to the United States, Abrikosov called on some of his colleagues and inquired about the possibility of his finding a job there. One of them told him that because of his high position in Russia, it would not be an easy task.
Abrikosov did not like uncertain situations. Heeding the fates of his friends who went to America and started looking for a position after they had arrived, he was determined that he would not move before he knew what he would be doing. So he sent out feelers, and after a while resigned himself to having to stay in Russia. Eventually, news came that there was an opening for him at Argonne National Laboratory near Chicago. On his next trip abroad, which happened to be to Venezuela, Abrikosov arranged for a week-long visit to Argonne, and there was a mutual interest in his moving there. The deal was that he would get a permanent position, and not just any position but one specifically created for him by the U.S. Department of Energy, as Distinguished Scientist. Abrikosov moved and has been at Argonne since 1991. He has not been back in Russia, and when I talked with him, in 2004, he had no intention of going back, even for a visit.
He no longer has a base in Russia, although he is still full member of the Russian Academy of Sciences and receives his enumeration there as a full member. His former associates at his institute consider him a captain who was the first to abandon his ship when it faced the danger of sinking. He and his first wife had been members of a closely knit circle of friends. When they divorced, those friends stayed friendly with his wife, and not with him, so he has no friends there anymore. His third wife is Russian, nineteen years his junior; their home in Lemont, Illinois, looks like a Russian island, down to the last porcelain figurine in their china cabinet. Their meals consist of traditional Russian dishes.
Abrikosov talks about Russia and the conditions there with contempt. When the news came about his Nobel Prize in October 2003, President Vladimir Putin sent him a congratulatory telegram, and the Russian Embassy in Washington invited him to attend a reception given by the Russian president in Moscow. Abrikosov declined; instead, he attended a reception by President George W. Bush in Washington, at which Abrikosov declared, “I am first and foremost an American citizen.”11 He had indeed become an American citizen in 1996 when he was sixty-eight-years old; he remained a Russian citizen, too.
Back in 1993, within a couple of years after his departure from Russia, Abrikosov was interviewed by a Russian journalist. In this interview Abrikosov made a powerful statement about science and scientists in Russia. Although it is impossible to know how truthfully the journalist conveyed his words, Abrikosov never publicly protested what was printed: “I am convinced that it is meaningless helping science there, in Russia. It is possible to raise the salaries of scientists, but it’s not possible to bring over instrumentation and equipment. As of today, there is only one recipe for the preservation of Russian science: all gifted scientists should be assisted to leave Russia and ignore those who stay there. My expression may seem unnecessarily brutal to you, and many disagree with me. But life has proved me right…. Any Russian scientist who has the opportunity departs from the country. This is also better for Russia.”12
Among those who disagreed was the American Nobel laureate Roald Hoffmann of Cornell University, himself an immigrant. He protested Abrikosov’s statement: “This is a bizarre and defeatist illogic.” He called Abrikosov’s statement “over-pessimistic and self-serving rationalization of emigration.” He expressed his hope for the future strengthening of science in Russia. Hoffmann’s statement first appeared on July 25, 1993, in the New York Times and then in Pravda.13 In the same issue of the New York Times that carried Hoffmann’s letter, there was a yet stronger and more personal condemnation of Abrikosov’s statement. It came from Alexander Migdal, then a Princeton University physics professor, himself a recent immigrant from the Soviet Union. Migdal’s father, the late Arkadii Migdal was one of Landau’s pupils, and a full member of the Science Academy.
Alexander Migdal also became a theoretical physicist, and before his immigration he worked for twenty years with Abrikosov in the Landau Institute. Migdal corrected an erroneous translation of one of Abrikosov’s statements in the New York Times. Abrikosov was quoted as saying that “he got hungry doing science,” which Migdal felt could be interpreted to mean that people went hungry if they were engaged in doing science. Although Soviet life was famous for food shortages, Migdal pointed out that the members of the Academy had special privileges to shop in exclusive stores. He interpreted Abrikosov’s remark as getting “hungry to do science.” Migdal referred to the fact that many high-positioned scientists no longer involved themselves in bona fide research work. Regarding Abrikosov’s suggestion that all talented scientists should be helped to leave Russia, and the rest ignored, Migdal wrote: “This smells like Stalinism! Stalin entertained himself by moving whole nations around the empire. But what about those who love Russia, those who would rather share the troubles of their country than leave it, those who feel responsible for the laboratories and the institutes they lead and those simply too young to have an international reputation?”14
There may be different opinions about such questions, but Abrikosov’s statement had considerable impact, because he had been a star in Soviet science and he had become one at an early age. His paper on the seminal discovery of Type II superconductors appeared in 1952 when he was twenty-four-years old, and he was awarded the Nobel Prize for it in 2003, at the age of seventy five. To get a sense of his discovery, one has to go back in the history of science to the discovery of superconductivity itself.
The Dutch physicist Heike Kamerlingh-Onnes spoke in his 1913 Nobel lecture about his discovery of superconductivity. He observed that on cooling mercury to near absolute zero temperature, the resistance to electrical conductivity drastically diminished—this vanishing took place abruptly rather than gradually. Further, he observed that the state of superconductivity could be destroyed by the application of a strong magnetic field. In 1933, German scientists reported the inverse phenomenon that in the superconductors there was practically no magnetic field present. In an independent investigation in the mid-1930s in Kharkov, Lev Shubnikov discovered the same phenomenon. Shubnikov and his pioneering achievements almost disappeared into oblivion. In 1937, when he was thirty-six years old, he was arrested on false charges during Stalin’s terror, tortured, and after being forced to admit the crime of conspiring against the Soviet state—which he never committed—he was executed. He was rehabilitated in 1956. In 2003, in his Nobel lecture, Abrikosov quoted Shubnikov’s discoveries and said, “I would like to pay here a tribute to Shubnikov, whose data gave me real inspiration. I never met him but I heard about him from Landau, who was his close friend.”15
For a long time, what later were called Type I superconductors, were the only superconductors that were known. But the observations about the relationship between superconducting and magnetic properties kept puzzling the physicists. Even the experimental discovery of Kammerlingh-Onnes found no theoretical interpretation for decades. The phenomenon was finally explained by John Bardeen, Leon Cooper, and J. Robert Schrieffer in 1957. Even before then, people understood many aspects of superconductors. In 1950, Vitaly Ginzburg and Lev Landau published a theory of superconductivity, which was based on Landau’s theory of the so-called second-order phase transitions, which he constructed in 1937. It was a relatively simple but at the same time general theory, which could describe phase transitions in many different substances. The Ginzburg-Landau theory made many useful predictions, but they required experimental verification.
One of Abrikosov’s great merits as a physicist was that he was always on the lookout for interesting experimental findings. One of his colleagues at the IFP, Nikolai Zavaritskii, was an experimental physicist. They had known each other since their university studies, and the two always discussed Zavaritskii’s experiments. At some point, Zavaritskii started to do experiments checking the predictions of the Ginzburg-Landau theory. Zavaritskii’s scientific advisor at the Institute, Aleksandr Shalnikov, had done similar experiments years before. Shalnikov had been one of Nikolai Semenov’s (see chapter 8) star associates in Leningrad, and in 1935 he moved to Moscow to join Kapitza’s new Institute of Physical Problems. At the time of Shalnikov’s experiments, there was no theory with whose predictions he could have compared his measurements. Zavaritskii was Shalnikov’s PhD student, and now everything came together to enable such comparisons. Zavaritskii found that the Ginzburg-Landau theory described his experiments to perfection.
These experiments were done on thin films, which Zavaritskii prepared by evaporating a metal onto a glass plate. Everybody was satisfied seeing the perfect match between Zavaritskii’s experiments and the Ginzburg-Landau prediction, everybody, that is, except Shalnikov. He was a perfectionist and was not satisfied because he did not find the preparation of the thin film in Zavaritskii’s experiment well defined. When Zavaritskii evaporated the metal onto the glass plate, the metal atoms reached the glass surface. It was at room temperature, which was sufficiently warm to allow the metal atoms to move around, and they formed microcrystallites. This meant that the metal cover of the glass plate was far from uniform, and the film was poorly characterized. Consequently, the conditions on the glass plate were not reproducible, and this was an important caveat, because for a scientific finding, it is a rigorous requirement that it be reproducible!
Shalnikov suggested keeping the glass plate very cold, at liquid helium temperature. The atoms reaching the glass surface would then stick to it; they would not move around and would not aggregate into microcrystallites. Rather, a smooth and uniform film would form—a reproducible structure. Shalnikov also warned that the film should not be heated until the measurements had been completed. Although this experiment was not easy to accomplish, Zavaritskii carried it out, and he made all the measurements for such low-temperature films. The results astonished everybody, because the measurements did not fit the Ginzburg-Landau theory at all. It seemed as if Shalnikov’s caution had destroyed a beautiful result. In reality, Shalnikov’s caution saved his colleagues from future embarrassment, which would have meant different results under different experimental conditions. In fact, these careful experiments paved the way to their yet more important discovery.
Abrikosov and Zavaritskii started to discuss what actually happened. Of course, one could always say that the theory was wrong, but the theory was beautiful by itself, and it explained many other properties correctly. These experiments and discussions prompted Abrikosov to work out a new theory. He called the superconductors for which he had worked it out “superconductors of the second group.” Eventually, they became known as Type II superconductors, and it was then that the other superconductors, already being known, received the name Type I superconductors. Eventually, it turned out that the Type II superconductors were the widespread kind, while the Type I ones seldom occur.
After the Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer (BCS) theory of superconductivity was published, Gorkov showed that the Ginzburg-Landau theory was a limiting case of the BCS theory meaning that its validity was limited to a certain set of specific conditions. In other words, the Ginzburg-Landau theory was consistent with the BCS theory, but the BCS theory provided a more general approach. The equivalence of the BCS theory and the Ginzburg-Landau theory—under certain conditions—was understood later.
Abrikosov and Zavaritskii published their papers separately, but they appeared in the same issue of Doklady Akademii Nauk (Proceedings of the Academy of Sciences)—Zavaritskii, his experimental data, and Abrikosov, his theory.16 In my conversation with Abrikosov, he stressed that often a discovery comes in an unimportant form. But then, the significance of the discovery becomes more and more recognized. At the beginning, the Type II superconductors were considered to be something exotic. They referred to films that were prepared in a very special way. At that time, it would have been impossible to predict that all superconductors discovered since 1916 were Type II superconductors. In contrast, today the question arises, why should we distinguish between Type II and Type I superconductors since nearly all superconductors are Type II. The fact remains that their understanding started with Zavaritskii’s very artificial thin films and Shalnikov’s criticism.
Following this initial success, Abrikosov went on to make further important theoretical discoveries, including some structures of what is called today the “Abrikosov vortex lattice.” I am not going to describe these structures as they are beyond the scope of this discussion, but one aspect of this work should throw some light on the working atmosphere in Landau’s group. Abrikosov was Landau’s pupil and Landau encouraged his pupils to become independent. The watershed in becoming independent was the passing of a set of exams, the teorminimum. Abrikosov was one of those who passed it.
Landau did not like to have people dependent on him for their choice of research projects; once he saw a project, he liked to solve it himself. This was another reason he encouraged his pupils to become independent. What Abrikosov learned from Landau on his way to independence was that he should “read the journals, attend the seminars and what is most important, discuss with experimentalists. [He has] done that all [his] life. [He has] read the papers, listened to people and listened to them very attentively; [he has] developed long ears.”17
Landau’s group at the IFP was small; at one point it consisted of himself, Abrikosov, Gorkov, Evgenii Lifshits, and Isaak Khalatnikov (the future director of the future Landau Institute). But Landau’s influence was much broader than the size of his research group suggests. His former pupils worked in the leading positions of many other research institutions. Most of them regularly attended Landau’s weekly seminars at the IFP. The attendees participated in these seminars not merely as passive listeners; everybody had to give a talk according to a timetable. Abrikosov acted for a long time as the secretary of these seminars; he kept the record of speakers. Some reported on their own work, others were given assignments to discuss published papers. Physical Review was Landau’s favorite journal and he marked the articles he wanted to hear about. The potential reporters were shown the selected papers, and they could choose one of them to discuss at one of the following seminars. This is how Abrikosov remembered those sessions:18
The nucleus [of the seminar] was about fifteen people, but others could come and sit in; Landau did not object to their presence. Preparing the reports was a heavy duty. Landau was very critical and if a person did not prepare well his talk, meaning mainly that he did not fully understand the paper which he was supposed to talk about, then Landau was furious. Although I was the secretary of the seminar, I also had to prepare reports. Once I was reporting on a paper that was especially difficult for me because I was not familiar with the field, and it meant a tremendous effort for me, but I remembered that paper for the whole of my life. I have benefited from the ideas of that paper and accomplished much more in that topic than the original author did.
Landau enjoyed tremendous authority before his pupils. Again, in Abrikosov’s words, “We, Landau’s pupils, trusted him more than we trusted our own judgment, and we never even attempted publishing anything about which we did not have his agreement.”19 This may be the key to understanding what happened in 1953 when Abrikosov first told Landau about what later became known as the Abrikosov vortex lattice. Initially, Landau did not comprehend the way Abrikosov was discussing it, and this is why Abrikosov stopped developing the idea. Later, after Richard Feynman had published something similar, which Landau liked, Abrikosov went ahead, developed his theory, and published it. But by then, his priority in creating an entirely new theory had been damaged. He has never forgiven his mentor for letting this happen.
It could indeed be interpreted that in this case Landau prevented Abrikosov from gaining full priority of an important theoretical discovery. But, of course, Landau did not do anything of the kind. It was Abrikosov’s deference to Landau’s authority that really made him stop continuing the project at that early stage, and the work, accordingly, suffered a sad delay. The story probably took on a life of its own when it became part of a controversy, as Abrikosov liked to complain about this episode—it obviously kept bothering him. But Landau cannot be blamed for Abrikosov’s failure to convince him about the validity of his idea when they first discussed it. The question arises, since Landau was a universally recognized genius, how could it happen that he did not see the point, even if Abrikosov was not sufficiently convincing? To this question Abrikosov responded: “Landau had a very special mind. Because he understood things much deeper than others, some things were not so easy for him to understand. He often noticed contradictions, which the original author did not even think about.”20
When Abrikosov told me this story, he appeared rather reserved and did not accuse Landau of, for example, forbidding him to work on and eventually publish his new idea. I understood that Landau’s authority was so great that the lack of his enthusiasm sufficed to make Abrikosov refrain from developing his idea further at that point. On other occasions, Abrikosov may have given a less subtle description of what had happened. This is perhaps why rumors started circulating that Landau had prevented Abrikosov from becoming the discoverer of an important effect. This was going on when Landau was already dead, and the story infuriated Evgenii Lifshits, Landau’s closest associate and coauthor. In 1978, Lifshits wrote a letter to John Bardeen who was not only a famous American physicist but also a giant in the research interests of Landau’s and Abrikosov’s. Lifshits wrote that Landau could have not hindered Abrikosov’s studying this topic and publishing his results, and asked Bardeen to inform the international community about this. Bardeen complied.
For the record, this is what Abrikosov said about this matter in 2003 in his Nobel lecture: “I made my derivation of the vortex lattice in 1953 but the publication was postponed since Landau first disagreed with the whole idea. Only after R. Feynman published his paper on vortices in superfluid helium, and Landau accepted the idea of vortices, he agreed with my derivation, and I published my paper in 1957.”21
Abrikosov was never shy about letting others know about his achievements. Vitaly Ginzburg recognized that Abrikosov’s activities in promoting recognition might have helped them receive the Nobel Prize. He said, “I might even say that in some sense our prize was due to Abrikosov. I think that he was very active in disseminating his results, sending out reprints, and so on.”22 Aspects of their nomination were narrated in the chapter 6, about Ginzburg.
Alexei Abrikosov and his third wife in 2004 in their home in Lemont, Illinois.
Source: Photograph by and courtesy of the author.
Abrikosov had always had heroes, but they changed over time. In this, as in many other aspects of life, he had a utilitarian approach. In his old age, Niels Bohr became his hero because Bohr continued doing physics almost until his death. According to Abrikosov, “There is illness in old age, on the one hand, the abilities of a person decrease, on the other hand, his self-esteem increases; he may think that what he can do now is only great work. Of course, this is not the case and such people usually do not produce anything. Bohr had a different attitude. He worked for fun, not fame, and with that attitude, he could work any time. I am doing exactly the same.”23
For all his flamboyance, Abrikosov was careful not to get involved in political dissidence. He respected political activists, such as Sakharov, but considered them to be fighting for a lost cause. He never wanted anything to do with lost causes; he wanted to do physics, and any political involvement with “lost causes” would have interfered with it. He was suspicious in the eyes of the authorities, not for any political action, but because of his marriage to a foreigner. They found him “unmanageable.”24 This is how Abrikosov summarized his personal philosophy: “I was independent. My mother was clever and able, but she was also very hard, even dictatorial, and for this reason, from my very childhood, I wanted independence. I learned to fight for my independence. At the same time, I was smart and I did not do foolish things. In science, I could have a choice and Landau encouraged it, so I chose my own way. Think thoroughly about various things and choose your own way. For a career, for publications, it is harder, but it is also more enjoyable.”25
At the age of eighty-five, with failing eyesight and in fragile health, I wonder whether Abrikosov’s quite skeptical outlook on life has deepened. He appeared taciturn in our latest exchange of e-mail messages. It is remarkable that having come to the United States in his mid-sixties, he could still make a career in his new environment. However, once he has passed his creative period, he and his wife might find themselves quite lonely. I wonder if he thinks about what it would have been like to spend his twilight years in Russia. For some reason, Lyndon Johnson’s words (and I forget their source) when he decided to return to Texas after his presidency come to mind. He wanted to go there to exchange his loneliness for a place where “they know when you’re sick and care when you die.” In 2004, Abrikosov appeared very hardened to me in his determination not to go back to Russia, ever. I wonder if he has ever wavered in his determination.