Boris Borisovich Kadomtsev (born 9.02.1928) is a Soviet physicist and an academician (1970; corresponding member 1962). He was born in Panfilovo. He graduated from Moscow University (1951). In 1952-56 he worked at the Institute of Physics and Power Engineering (Obninsk) and since 1956 at the Kurchatov Institute of Atomic Energy (head of the plasma physics department from 1973), and he has been head of a chair at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology.
His research was in the field of plasma physics and the problem of controlled thermonuclear fusion, and of magnetohydrodynamics, in particular the development of a theory of the mechanisms of plasma instability in particular systems and of a theory of turbulent plasma in magnetic traps. Independently of others he predicted the flute instability of a rarefied plasma and worked out the foundations of the theory of weak turbulence, which takes into account the scattering of waves by particles and the so-called processes of wave decay. He gave a theoretical explanation of a number of instability phenomena in systems for confining plasma and proposed methods of suppressing instability. For his part in the study of the instability of high-temperature plasma in a magnetic field and in the creation of a method of stabilising it by a “magnetic well” he was awarded the USSR State Prize in 1970. In 1960, together with A. V. Nedospasov, he showed that the instability of the weakly ionised plasma of a gas discharge is due to the development of a helical instability, and he proposed a theory that predicts exactly the value of the critical field and the rate of anomalous diffusion in fields above the critical one (the Kadomtsev — Nedospasov theory of the helical instability). His work also concerned the study of the stability of the Earth's radiation belts, nonlinear wave processes, the transport of radiation and the behaviour of matter in superstrong magnetic fields.
An honorary member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.