Boris Valerianovich Chirikov
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Author: Dr. Dima Shepelyansky, Laboratoire de Physique Théorique, CNRS, Université Paul Sabatier, Toulouse
Dr. Dima Shepelyansky accepted the invitation on 19 February 2008 (self-imposed deadline: 19 April 2008).
This article will briefly cover: biography and scientific results of Boris Chirikov (article is under development)
Boris Valerianovich Chirikov (Russian Борис Валерианович Чириков), born 6 June 1998 in Oryol, Russia, USSR, died 12 February 2008 in Akademgorodok, Novosibirsk, was an outstanding Soviet and Russian physicist. He was the founder of the physical theory of Hamiltonian chaos and made pioneering contributions to the theory of quantum chaos. In 1959, he invented the Chirikov criterion which analytically determines the conditions for emergence of deterministic chaos in dynamical Hamiltonian systems.
Life and physics
The mother of B.V.Chirikov was Chirikova Lidia Vasilievna, she worked as a teacher, pedagogue, librarian. His father, Leronskii Valerian Nikolaevich, left the family and Boris was not remembering him. Their small family was living in Oryol approximately until 1936 when they both fled famine and went to Leningrad where a sister of the mother helped them to install. They were living there till the war came and around 1942 with a last group of children, supervised by the mother, they were evacuated from Leningrad to the southern region of Russia around Krasnodar. About 4 months later this region was occupied by the German army and they were living under occupation being liberated by the Soviet Army in 1944. Soon after that the mother died from leukemia. Fortunately, Boris was helped by a teacher of his school who took him to her home. After the school was finished in 1945 Boris went to Moscow to continue his studies.
Boris entered to the Moscow Pedagogical Institute and at the second year became a student at the recently created Department of Physics and Technology at Moscow State University (transformed later to the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, MIPT). He did his undergraduate and master studies there and continued his experimental studies at the Termotechnical Laboratory (TTL), later evolved into the Institute for Theoretical and Experimental Physics (ITEP). Graduated from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology in 1952, for few years Boris was involved in the study of meson physics at the TTL. In 1954 he accepted the offer of Gersh Budker, at that time Head of Laboratory of Novel Acceleration Methods, to join his group at LIPAN (currently the Kurchatov Institute) and to start working on problems of accelerator and plasma physics. In 1958 Budker has founded the Institute of Nuclear Physics (INP) in Akademgorodok, Novosibirsk (now Budker Institute of Nuclear Physics). Boris became the member of the INP at April 15, 1958, same day as Budker. He moved to Siberia in September 1959. Since that time and until his last days, he was working at the INP, first as the experimentalist, and then gradually evolving into a world class theoretician. He became a corresponding member of the Russian Academy of Sciences in 1983, and a full member in 1992. He left after him wife Olga Bashina and daughter Galya Chirikova.
The name of Boris Chirikov is associated with an impressive list of fundamental results in the field of dynamical chaos and foundations of statistical mechanics. As early as 1959, in a seminal article, Chirikov proposed a criterion for the emergence of classical chaos in Hamiltonian systems, now known as the Chirikov criterion (Atom. Energ. 6: 630 (1959)). In the same paper, he applied such criterion to explain some puzzling experimental results on plasma confinement in open mirror traps, that had just been obtained at the Kurchatov Institute. This was the very first physical theory of chaos, which succeeded in explaining a concrete experiment, and which was developed long before computers made the icons of chaos familiar to everyone.
Other results obtained by his group include: the determination of the strong chaos border and the explanation of the Fermi-Pasta-Ulam problem; the derivation of the chaos border for the Fermi acceleration model; the numerical computation of the Kolmogorov-Sinai entropy in area-preserving maps; the investigations of weak instabilities in many-dimensional Hamiltonian systems (Arnold diffusion and modulational diffusion); the demonstration that the homogeneous models of classical Yang-Mills field have positive Kolmogorov-Sinai entropy, and therefore are generally not integrable; the discovery of the power law decay of Poincaré recurrences in Hamiltonian systems with divided phase space; the demonstration that the dynamics of the Halley comet is chaotic, and is described by a simple map.
He essentially invented the Chirikov standard map, described its chaos properties, established its universality and found a variety of applications. The quantum version of this map, also known as the kicked rotator, demonstrates the phenomenon of dynamical localization of quantum chaos which was observed in experiments with hydrogen and Rydberg atoms in a microwave field and cold atoms and Bose-Einstein condensates in kicked optical lattices.
The physical theory of deterministic chaos developed by Boris Chirikov finds applications for dynamics of solar system, particle dynamics in accelerators and plasma magnetic traps, and various other systems.
| Author: Dr. Dima Shepelyansky, Laboratoire de Physique Théorique, CNRS, Université Paul Sabatier, Toulouse |
| Invited by: | Dr. Eugene M. Izhikevich, Editor-in-Chief of Scholarpedia, the free peer reviewed encyclopedia |
