Alexei Alexeyevich Abrikosov
1928–2017, Moscow, Soviet Union, Palo Alto, California, United States
Russian-American theoretical physicist who predicted type-II superconductors and the vortex lattice — the key to modern superconducting magnets.
Abrikosov earned his PhD in Moscow in 1951 and became one of Lev Landau's closest students. His early work explained why some alloys remain superconducting in strong magnetic fields.
In 1957 he showed that in 'type-II' superconductors, magnetic field penetrates the material as a lattice of quantum vortices — each filament carrying exactly one flux quantum. He also contributed to cosmic nucleosynthesis theory, Kondo alloys, and plasma physics. He moved to Argonne in 1991 and shared the 2003 Nobel Prize with Ginzburg and Leggett.
Nobel-winning work
The Ginzburg–Landau theory (1950) described superconductivity via a complex order parameter, but predicted the superconducting–normal boundary always 'costs' surface energy. In 1957 Abrikosov realized: for materials with Ginzburg–Landau parameter κ > 1/√2, the surface energy is negative — a mixture of both phases is favored.
Solving the theory near the upper transition field, he found a periodic solution: the field enters as a triangular array of vortices, each a normal core wrapped in supercurrent carrying one flux quantum Φ₀ = h/2e. 'Type-II' superconductivity explains why Nb-Ti and Nb₃Sn alloys stay superconducting up to very high fields Hc2 — the basis of MRI magnets, maglev trains, and accelerators. The 2003 Nobel cited 'pioneering contributions to the theory of superconductors and superfluids'.
Workplaces: Landau Institute, Moscow, Argonne National Laboratory
Russia, United States