Fedor Ivanovich Fedorov ( born 19.06.1911) is a Soviet theoretical physicist and an academician of the Academy of Sciences of the Byelorussian SSR (1966). He was born in Turets, Minsk Governorate. He graduated from the Byelorussian University (1931). He has worked at the Byelorussian University since 1936 (as professor from 1957) and since 1953 as head of the laboratory of theoretical physics of the Institute of Physics of the Academy of Sciences of the Byelorussian SSR. Since 1963 he has also been academician-secretary of the Department of Physical and Mathematical Sciences of the Academy of Sciences of the Byelorussian SSR.
His work was in the field of quantum field theory, elementary particle physics and the theory of wave propagation in crystals. He established the general properties of the minimal polynomials of the matrices of the relativistic wave equations that describe elementary particles, and developed a general method of projection operators that makes it possible to obtain, in covariant and compact form, all the characteristics of the states of particles with arbitrary spin. He proposed an original parametrisation of the Lorentz group, which made it possible to construct the theory of this group and its representations in a new way and led to a simple solution of the basic problems of relativistic kinematics.
He developed covariant methods of direct tensor calculus and applied them to problems in the optics and acoustics of crystals. On this basis he was the first to give (1954) a general and rigorous theory of the propagation of electromagnetic waves in media that possess simultaneously all possible kinds of anisotropy. He constructed a consistent theory of the gyrotropy of crystals (1976). He discovered (1954) the phenomenon of the lateral shift of a light beam on reflection (the Fedorov shift). He was the first to propose (1965) an analytical method of calculating the temperature for crystals of arbitrary symmetry. For the series of works “The Theory of the Optical Properties of Anisotropic Media” he was awarded the USSR State Prize in 1976.
Hero of Socialist Labour (1978).