Fatkhulla Abdullaev

Fatkhulla Khabibullaevich Abdullaev was born in Tashkent on 14 January 1948. He finished school No. 82 as an external student, studied at the faculty of physics of Tashkent State University in 1964–1969 and served in the army in 1969–1971.

In 1971, as a postgraduate at the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Dubna, he began working on models with non-polynomial Lagrangians and then turned to the semiclassical limit of quantum electrodynamics with gravity. He became a Candidate of Sciences in 1975 and defended his doctoral dissertation “Dynamics of solitons in inhomogeneous media” in Kyiv in 1985.

From 1977 he worked in the Thermophysics Department of the Academy of Sciences of the Uzbek SSR, serving in 1986–1992 as deputy head for science and then as head. He was made professor in 1990 and chaired the physics expert council of the Higher Attestation Commission in 1992–1997. From 1987 he worked as a visiting professor at research centres in Australia, the United Kingdom, Germany, Brazil, Italy, France, Japan and other countries.

His research is in nonlinear physics: optical solitons and their dynamical chaos in inhomogeneous media, modulational instability in optical fibres and nonlinear waves in Bose–Einstein condensates. His prediction of an optical analogue of Anderson localization in arrays of optical fibres was observed experimentally in 2004. He wrote monographs on these subjects and edited international volumes.

In 1989 he received the Abu Rayhan Beruni State Prize for work on nonlinear wave processes in the interaction of laser radiation with matter. He was named Honoured Scientist of the Republic of Uzbekistan in 1995 and received the al-Khwarizmi Medal in 2003 for his work on Bose–Einstein condensates. On 23 December 2023 he was confirmed as a full member of the Academy of Sciences of Uzbekistan, an academician.