Emmanuil Adirovich

Emmanuil Ilich Adirovich was born on 24 August 1915 in Melitopol (now in Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia Oblast). He studied in Moscow and graduated from Moscow State University in 1940.

His research career began in Moscow. From 1944 to 1949 he worked at the Moscow Petroleum Institute, and he then moved to the P. N. Lebedev Physical Institute of the USSR Academy of Sciences, where he stayed until 1962. In 1949 he defended his doctoral dissertation and became a Doctor of Physical and Mathematical Sciences.

His field was solid-state physics, in particular electronic processes in crystals and dielectrics. Adirovich is counted among the founders of the band theory of crystal luminescence; he proposed a quasi-stationary method for problems in the kinetics of electrical processes in solids, described the “cold flash” effect and established the laws of electronic polarization and depolarization in photoelectrets. His monograph “Some Problems in the Theory of Crystal Luminescence” appeared in 1951.

In 1962 he was elected a full member of the Academy of Sciences of the Uzbek SSR in semiconductor physics. From that year he worked in Tashkent, heading a department at the Physical-Technical Institute of the Uzbek SSR Academy of Sciences, and from 1963 he held a professorship there.

His results include a theory of optrons and optron circuits, the discovery of anomalously large photovoltages and photomagnetic voltages in semiconductor films, and an exact solution of the problem of emission currents in a dielectric under thermionic and field emission from a metal. He wrote more than 200 scientific papers.

Emmanuil Adirovich died in Tashkent on 10 September 1973 and was buried at the Botkin Cemetery. In 1978, after his death, the book “Double-Injection Currents in Semiconductors”, written with P. M. Karageorgy-Alkalaev and A. Yu. Leiderman, was published in Moscow.