Kharkiv Institute of Physics and Technology


The National Science Center Kharkiv Institute of Physics and Technology is the oldest and largest physical science research centre in Ukraine. Today it is known as a science center as it consists of several institutes that are part of the Kharkiv Institute of Physics and Technology science complex.

History

The institute was founded on 30 October 1928, by the Government of Soviet Ukraine on an initiative of Abram Ioffe on the northern outskirts of Kharkiv as the Ukrainian Institute of Physics and Technology for the purpose of research on nuclear physics and condensed matter physics. Note that Kharkiv at that time was the capital of Soviet Ukraine. An opening of the institute precisely in Kharkiv had an ideological implication: At height of being defeated by the Russian Red Army, the "samostiynyky" of various modifications who laid at the basis of Ukrainian national consciousness their culture of the past, the Soviet Ukraine has implemented new culture based on advanced achievements of the human intellect and modern technologies rather than on sharovary, folk songs, and oseledets.
From the moment of its creation, the institute was run by the People's Commissariat of Heavy Industry.
On 10 October 1932 the first experiments in nuclear fission in the Soviet Union were conducted here. The Soviet nuclear physicists Anton Valter, Georgiy Latyshev, Cyril Sinelnikov, and Aleksandr Leipunskii used a lithium atom nucleus. Later the Ukrainian Institute of Physics and Technology was able to obtain liquid hydrogen and helium. They also constructed a radar station, and the institute became a pioneer of the Soviet high vacuum engineering which was developed into an industrial vacuum metallurgy.
During the Stalin epoch, this was where the UPTI Affair occurred in 1938: three leading physicists of the Kharkiv Institute were arrested by the Soviet secret police.
The Ukrainian Institute of Physics and Technology was the "Laboratory no. 1" for nuclear physics, and was responsible for the first development of a nuclear bomb in the former USSR.

Directors

Science and education institutions in Pyatykhatky.

Kharkiv Institute of Physics and Technology