Petr Ivanovich Lukirsky (13.12.1894—16.02.1954) was a Soviet experimental physicist and an academician (1946, a corresponding member from 1933). He was born in Orenburg. He graduated from Petrograd University (1916). In 1918—54 he worked at the Leningrad Physico-Technical Institute and at the same time, in 1919—38, at Leningrad University (from 1928 as professor); from 1943 he was head of the physics department of the Radium Institute of the USSR Academy of Sciences and from 1945 professor and head of a chair at the Leningrad Polytechnic Institute.
His main research concerned physical electronics, the physics of X-rays and nuclear physics. He was the author of a number of experimental methods of investigation, in particular the spherical capacitor method, the method of the parallel displacement of characteristics and the ionisation method of determining contact potentials. He carried out a series of works on the photoelectric effect that have become classics. He confirmed Einstein's equation for the photoelectric effect and obtained the most accurate value of Planck's constant available at that time (1926). He studied in detail the electron emission from the surface of thin metal films and their contact properties, which was of great importance for explaining the mechanism by which complex photocathodes work and led him to the creation in 1937 of the antimony-caesium photocathode.
Lukirsky's research in the physics of the atomic nucleus concerned the study of the processes of interaction of neutrons and mesons with nuclei and more besides. He created a school of experimental physicists (A. I. Alikhanov, A. I. Alikhanyan, L. A. Artsimovich, V. E. Lashkarev, L. N. Dobretsov, A. P. Zhdanov, V. M. Dukelsky, A. N. Murin, S. V. Starodubtsev and others)