Evgeny Fedorovich Gross (20.10.1897-4.04.1972) was a Soviet experimental physicist and a corresponding member of the USSR Academy of Sciences (1946). He was born in the village of Kolpino (now in the Leningrad Region). He graduated from Leningrad University (1924) and worked there (professor from 1938). From 1944 he was also at the Leningrad Physico-Technical Institute of the USSR Academy of Sciences, and from 1964 at the Institute of Semiconductors of the USSR Academy of Sciences.
His research concerned optics and spectroscopy. He carried out a series of studies of the scattering of light in condensed systems, and in 1930 discovered the fine structure of the Rayleigh scattering line in crystals and liquids, which had been predicted by L. I. Mandelstam and L. Brillouin and is due to scattering by hypersonic waves. Together with M. F. Vuks he discovered in 1935 the low-frequency scattering spectrum in crystals (the Gross frequencies), which is associated with intermolecular vibrations in the lattice, and established the nature of the “wings” of the Rayleigh line in liquids. He studied the connection between the scattering of light in liquids and relaxation phenomena in them, and in 1940 proposed a method of determining the relaxation time of molecules from the spectrum of the scattered light, applicable to non-polar liquids (USSR State Prize, 1946).
He studied the electron spectra of crystals. In 1951 he proved experimentally the existence of Wannier — Mott excitons in semiconductor crystals. He studied many properties of excitons and discovered a number of new phenomena, in particular observing exciton energy bands (Lenin Prize, 1966).