Shining Cherenkov's light on Vavilov
The article on Cherenkov light in “Explain it in 60 seconds” (Aug 09) provides a concise and helpful explanation of Cherenkov radiation to readers.
Of course, the Cherenkov radiation is named to honor the Russian physicist Pavel Alekseyevich Cherenkov and this term is commonly used by the physics community. But Vitaly Ginzburg, the Russian physicist who died recently, always called the radiation Vavilov-Cherenkov radiation to give credit to the other co-discoverer, Sergei Ivanovich Vavilov.
Ginzburg introduced the physics of Vavilov-Cherenkov radiation in his book, About Science, Myself and Others, and he wrote a short biography of Vavilov in another book The Physics of a Lifetime: Reflections on the Problems and Personalities of 20th Century Physics.
The 1958 Nobel Prize in physics was awarded to Cherenkov, Il'ja Mikhailovich Frank, and Igor Yevgenyevich Tamm “for the discovery and the interpretation of the Cherenkov effect”. It would be not acceptable for Ginzburg that the Nobel committee did not include Vavilov's name in the headline of the announcement. Vavilov died in 1951, and Nobel Prizes are not given to dead persons.
It is worthy of mentioning that the relationship between Vavilov and Cherenkov was teacher-student. In 1933 Vavilov proposed the PhD topic “The luminescence of the uranyl salt solutions under the influence of hard gamma radiation” to Cherenkov. As a consequence of Cherenkov's hard work, their study turned out to be two papers published in 1934. One paper was on experimental results by Cherenkov, and the other was by Vavilov in which he proposed, correctly, that the origin of the new phenomenon was fast electrons.
Min-Liang Wong, National Chung-Hsing University, Taiwan