The prize has been given to Prof. Vasily Parkhomchuk "for crucial contributions in the proof of principle of electron cooling, for leading contribution to the experimental and theoretical development of electron cooling, and for achievement of the planned parameters of coolers for facilities in laboratories around the world". It is the third Russian scientist who has been awarded the prize since its establishment in 1986. The other researchers were Alexander N. Skrinsky (in 2002), the then Director of the Budker Institute of Nuclear Physics, and Yaroslav Derbenev (in 2011) from the same institute, now working at Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility.
The method of electron cooling is based on the cooling of beams by an accompanying electron flux as the result of Coulomb collisions of the particles. The method was proposed by Gersh Budker as early as in 1966, but it took about 9 years to implement it and conduct first successful experiments on cooling protons.
Notes on the biography of the winner: After graduating from NSU in 1968, Vasily Parkhomchuk started to work at the Institute of Nuclear Physics (Novosibirsk) and defended his Candidate’s thesis entitled First experiments on electron cooling supervised by G. Budker. He went on developing technologies for electron cooling by conducting experiments with the Antiproton Accumulator Model NAP-M, which was the first installation in the world to study the electron cooling. Vasily Parkhomchuk also participated in the German scientific project GSI at GSI Helmholtzzentrum für Schwerionenforschung developing the electron cooler for the synchrotron SIS-18 (1968). In 1997, Dr. Parkhomchuk was elected a correspondent member of the Russian Academy of Sciences. In 2001-2004 he supervised the Cooler-Storage-Ring (CSR) project in the Institute of Modern Physics (Chinese Academy of Sciences). Now he heads the laboratory of electron cooling at BINP (SB RAS). The American Physical Society points out that the electron coolers developed by Vasily Parkhomchuk are used for the Large Hadron Collider in CERN and many other accelerator complexes all other the world. The international Robert R. Wilson Prize, which was established in memory of the founder of the famous American Fermilab Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab, Batavia IL, United States), has been awarded annually since 1986 for outstanding achievement in the physics of particle accelerators. The prize amounts $7,500.
Prepared by Anastasiya Anikina Photos by Angelina Ivanova
