Alekseevsky, Nikolai Evgenyevich

Nikolai Evgenyevich Alekseevsky (born 23.05.1912) is a Soviet experimental physicist and a corresponding member of the USSR Academy of Sciences (1960). He was born in Petropavlovsk. He graduated from the Leningrad Polytechnic Institute (1936). In 1936-41 he worked at the Kharkov Physico-Technical Institute. Since 1942 he has worked at the Institute of Physical Problems of the USSR Academy of Sciences (as senior research fellow and head of a laboratory). His research concerned low-temperature physics. In 1936—38, together with L. V. Shubnikov and V. I. Khotkevich, he studied the destruction of superconductivity in metals and alloys under the simultaneous action of a current flowing through them and of an external magnetic field, found the particular features of this destruction, and gave (1936) the first experimental proof of Silsbee's hypothesis about the nature of the destruction of superconductivity by a current. He carried out studies of the superconducting properties of pure metals and of metallic alloys. In studying the kinetics of superconducting transitions he established that the destruction of superconductors by a current is bound up with the appearance of an intermediate state, and that the transition into that state takes place in a non-equilibrium way. He studied the effect of hydrostatic pressure and of uniaxial elastic strain on the superconducting properties of metals and alloys. He carried out a series of studies of the galvanomagnetic properties of pure metals in strong magnetic fields at low temperatures (USSR State Prize, 1967). He detected superconductivity in a number of alloys made of non-superconducting components and studied their properties (N. D. Papalexi Prize, 1951). He studied the properties of multicomponent alloys and compounds, both in the normal and in the superconducting state.