The radiochemist who led the Radium Institute and laid the institutional foundations of Soviet nuclear physics
On 1 December 1921, in his Petrograd laboratory, Khlopin personally obtained the Soviet Union's first high-activity radium preparation.
One of the founders of Soviet radiochemistry, he produced the country's first domestic radium in 1921 and formulated the law of microcomponent distribution between phases (Khlopin's law) in 1924. Succeeding Vernadsky as director of the Radium Institute, he installed Europe's first cyclotron there in 1937, creating the experimental basis for fission research. In June 1940 he and Vernadsky submitted a memorandum on the uranium problem that led to the creation of the Uranium Committee on 30 July, with Khlopin as its first chairman, placing him at the center of pre-war nuclear research coordination. After the war his institute developed the plutonium separation technology that made the 1949 test possible.
Career Timeline
- 1915Began research at the Academy of Sciences Radiological Laboratory at Vernadsky's invitation
- 1921Obtained the first Soviet high-activity radium preparation
- 1922–1935Deputy director and head of the chemical department, Radium Institute
- 1936–1950Director of the Radium Institute
- 1940Chairman of the Academy of Sciences Committee on the Uranium Problem
- 1943, 1946, 1949Three-time Stalin Prize laureate
- 1945Founded the USSR's first radiochemistry chair at Leningrad University