Pavel Alekseyevich Cherenkov and the Cherenkov Effect

The 1958 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to Pavel Alekseyevich Cherenkov, Ilya Frank and Igor Tamm for the discovery and the interpretation of the Cherenkov Effect. Cherenkov radiation is the electromagnetic radiation emitted by particles moving through a medium faster than the speed of light in the same medium. It was fist a detected by Soviet scientist Pavel Alekseyevich Cherenkov, of who the effect is named after and a theory was later developed by Ilya Frank and Igor Tamm. Cherenkov’s contributions still live on as an invaluable tool in todays nuclear and subatomic particle physics with examples that include a way to detect and quantify the characteristics of subatomic particles to analyzing high energy cosmic signals from the deepest regions of space. More down to earth uses consist of safety procedures for nuclear reactors and the detection of low concentration biomolecules in the sick and elderly. Despite the underprivileged life as the child of Russian peasants, Pavel Cherenkov was able to graduate from the Physics and Mathematics Faculty of Voronezh State University in 1928 and went onto a post graduate course at the Academy of Science in St. Petersburg. His work in physics soon promoted him to a senior scientific officer at the P.N. Lebedev Institute, more commonly known as the physics branch of the Academy of Science in Moscow. It was here at the Academy in 1932, that an interest in the color of light given off from gamma rays passing through a fluid would led