Grigori Volovik - 80

Warmest congratulations to our colleague Grigori Yefimovich Volovik, born 07/09/1946, member of the Editorial Board of JETP Letters and a Deputy Editor since 1991, on the occasion of his 80th birthday.

Grigori’s ascent to the elite of theoretical physics has been pretty straightforward and swift: in 1964 he became a student of the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology (MIPT); upon having passed a needle eye of close to 20 applications per place he was selected by none but P.L. Kapitsa as a student to his chair of low temperature physics. He was subsequently one of the top students in the Class of 1970 at the MIPT Faculty of General and Applied Physics and continued as PhD student at the Landau Institute of Theoretical Physics (Landau ITP); ever since 1973 he is a staff member of Landau ITP, a principal researcher since 1994. Grigori defended his PhD thesis in 1973 and habilitated in 1982.

Grigori’s moment of glory came in 1975 when he, in collaboration with V.P. Mineyev, turned his eye on the rich topological properties of the superfluid He-3, and subsequently extended the developed technique to superconductivity. Eventually, he became a world renowned guru in this field of physics. A

longside his work at the Landau Institute, in 1993, Grigory became a professor at the Low Temperature Laboratory of the Helsinki University of Technology, and in 2001 became a foreign member of the Finnish Academy of Science and Letters, followed by election in 2007 to the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina.

The results of this series of studies are summarized in the monograph Exotic properties of superfluid ³He (World Scientific, 1992). Also in 1992. Grigory became, together with V.P. Mineev, winner of the Landau gold medal, and in 2014, Grigori, jointly with V.P. Mineev, was awarded the Lars Onsager prize of the American Physical Society for «their contribution to a comprehensive classification of topological defects in condensed matter phases with broken symmetry, culminating in the prediction of half-quantum vortices in superfluid He-3 and related systems.”

An important part of Gregory’s scientific biography is the famous book The Universe in a Helium Droplet (Clarendon Press, Oxford 2003, 2nd edition 2009, 4000+ citations). It is based on his new series of works extending concepts that proved so successful in the study of superfluidity and superconductivity to problems concerning phase transitions and topological defects in the Universe, as well as to the Standard Model of particle physics.

For this series of studies, Grigory was awarded the 2004 Simon Memorial Prize, with the citation «for his pioneering research on the effects of symmetry in superfluids and superconductors and for extending these concepts to quantum field theory, cosmology, quantum gravity and particle physics».

Grigory continues to work tirelessly in the field of theoretical physics, constantly expanding his list of publications (which has by now exceeded 500), and on the journal’s editorial board—as deputy editor-in-chief and a “guru” in the field of condensed matter theory.

The Editorial Board of JETP Letters wishes the honoree robust health, longevity, and we look forward to more inspiration from his studies and continuous advantage from his expertise in our Board.