Qualla: Kharkiv Institute of Physics and Technology

Kharkiv Institute of Physics and Technology: Introduction

Mon, 13 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Lystopad, CC BY-SA 4.0. On 10 October 1932, in a cluster of laboratory buildings on the northern outskirts of Kharkiv, four physicists aimed a beam of accelerated particles at a target of lithium and watched a nucleus break apart. It was the first artificial splitting of an atomic nucleus performed in the Soviet Union, and it happened not in Moscow or Leningrad but here, in a leafy suburb called Piatykhatky where the streetcars still ran out to the edge of the fields. The men who did it - Anton Valter, Georgiy Latyshev, Cyril Sinelnikov, and Aleksandr Leipunskii - had built their apparatus almost from scratch. What they set in motion would outlast them by nearly a century.

Image: Lystopad | CC BY-SA 4.0

Kharkiv Institute of Physics and Technology: A Laboratory Willed Into Existence

Mon, 13 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Konstantin Brizhnichenko, CC BY-SA 4.0. The institute was founded on 30 October 1928 at the urging of Abram Ioffe, the Leningrad physicist whose students would seed physics departments across the young Soviet Union. Ioffe wanted a second great center of research, and Soviet Ukraine gave him one. The People's Commissari...

Image: Konstantin Brizhnichenko | CC BY-SA 4.0

Kharkiv Institute of Physics and Technology: The Cold and the Discovery

Mon, 13 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ace^eVg, Public domain. In 1931 a young physicist named Lev Shubnikov came to Kharkiv to lead a new low-temperature laboratory, and the cold he commanded there produced one of the institute's most enduring contributions to science. In 1935, working near the frontier of what refrigeration could achieve, ...

Image: Ace^eVg | Public domain

Kharkiv Institute of Physics and Technology: When the Terror Came

Mon, 13 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ace^eVg, CC BY 3.0. In 1937 and 1938, at the height of Stalin's Great Terror, the institute became the site of the so-called UPTI Affair. The secret police arrested three of its leading physicists - Lev Landau, Yuri Rumer, and Moisey Korets - on fabricated charges. Landau, one of the most brilliant ...

Image: Ace^eVg | CC BY 3.0

Kharkiv Institute of Physics and Technology: The Long Afterlife

Mon, 13 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ace^eVg, CC BY 3.0. The institute endured. It became the Soviet Union's Laboratory No. 1 for nuclear physics and carried out early conceptual work on a Soviet atomic bomb. Its alumni roster reads like a syllabus of twentieth-century physics: Igor Kurchatov, Evgeny Lifshitz, Boris Podolsky, Isaak Pom...

Image: Ace^eVg | CC BY 3.0