Oleg Fedorovich Nemets (born 13.02.1922) is a Soviet physicist and an academician of the Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian SSR (1978). He was born in Kiev. He graduated from the Kiev Polytechnic Institute (1947). In 1949-70 he worked at the Institute of Physics of the Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian SSR (from 1961 as head of a department and from 1958 as deputy director); from 1970 he has been head of a department at the Institute for Nuclear Research of the Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian SSR, and from 1974 its director. From 1961 he has also been professor at Kiev University.
His work was on nuclear physics. He studied the scattering of deuterons and alpha particles of medium energies by nuclei and the reactions of such particles with nuclei, measured the vector polarisation of deuterons in elastic scattering on a number of nuclei, and created (1971) a polarised helium-3 target. He detected new effects, isotopic and shell effects, and showed the role of three-particle effects in nuclear reactions. He gave an experimental basis for the optical model of the nucleus for composite particles and determined the degree of spin dependence of nuclear forces. He identified the mechanisms of many nuclear reactions. He established the connection between the mechanisms of nuclear reactions and the nature of the excited nuclear levels. He studied the mechanism of the nuclear reaction of deuteron breakup, showed that the reaction proceeds by three different mechanisms, and detected (1968) a non-monotonic dependence of the deuteron breakup cross-section on atomic mass.