Akulov, Nikolai Sergeyevich

Nikolai Sergeyevich Akulov (12.12.1900 - 21.09.1976) was a Soviet physicist and an academician of the Academy of Sciences of the Byelorussian SSR (1940). He was born in Orel. He graduated from Moscow University (1926) and worked there until 1954 (from 1931 as professor). In 1955-57 he was professor at the Moscow Institute of Chemical Engineering. From 1963 he was head of the department of the physics of non-destructive testing of the Academy of Sciences of the Byelorussian SSR, and from 1967 head of a laboratory in that department. His main research concerned ferromagnetism. In 1928 he formulated the law of induced anisotropy, which plays a large part in the modern theory of magnetic materials. In 1934, independently of F. Bitter, he proposed the method of magnetic metallography and proved experimentally that regions of spontaneous magnetisation exist in ferromagnets. He studied the effect of magnetic fields and of elastic stresses on various physical characteristics of ferromagnetic metals, and investigated the temperature dependence of the most important magnetic parameters. He created apparatus for the non-destructive testing of industrial products — flaw detectors, a magnetic anisometer, a magnetic micrometer and others. His research was also in the fields of combustion physics, the theory of plasticity and strength, ferroelectricity and biophysics. USSR State Prize (1941). M. V. Lomonosov Prize (1953).