Ilya M. Frank; Nobel Prize Winner in Physics

Ilya M. Frank, 81, physicist who won the Nobel Prize in 1958 for his work in neutron physics. The Moscow newscast “Vremya” praised him as an “outstanding Soviet physicist” who made “substantial contribution to nuclear physics.” Frank shared the Nobel Physics Prize with two other Soviet scientists, Pavel Cherenkov and Igor Y. Tamm. Frank and Tamm explained the radiation first discovered in 1934 by Cherenkov. They determined that it occurred when a charged particle is traveling through a medium faster than the speed of light in that medium. The particle displaces electrons in the atoms of a medium, producing an electromagnetic wave. Frank worked at the Leningrad Optical Institute, the Lebedev Institute of Physics and in 1957 was put in charge of the lab at Moscow University. He also received the Soviet Union’s Lenin Prize. In Moscow on Friday of unreported causes.