Talk:Abram A. Slutskin

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According to standard practice, Abram Slutskin cannot be named "Russian scientist" because he lived and worked all his life in Ukraine. For instance, his most famous former student Semion Braude is correctly mentioned in Wikipedia as "Ukrainian scientist." He can be called, however, a Soviet scientist although he started his research career well before the communist revolution [1a,2a]. He was an ethnic Ukrainian Jew (similarly to S. Braude) by his origin. Through his career, Slutskin had much stronger ties with the Academy of Sciences of Ukraine than with any organization or agency in Russia. Until his death he remained strongly negative to the involvement of UPTI under the umbrella of the Moscow-based 1-st Chief Directorate (nicknamed "Nuclear Politburo") and kept his LEMO out of this structure [1a].

The magnetrons developed by Slutskin between 1925 and 1941 were not the "cavity magnetrons" that became famous during the World War II, they were the "split-anode magnetrons" [2a]. This device had no internal high-quality cavities that stabilized the frequency of the generated electromagnetic oscillations. As a result, the split-anode magnetrons were extremely unstable sources and their use in the design of pulsed radar was not successful. The true cavity magnetron was invented by Randall and Boot in 1939-1940; it had 6 and later 8 side cavities at 10-cm wavelength and 10 kW output power. A similar device of Alekseev and Malyarov dated 1936 (their Soviet paper published in 1940 was translated in the US in 1944 where Malyarov was erroneously typed as "Malairov"); however it had only 4 side cavities and therefore the output power was only 300 W at 9 cm [3a]. This was in fact the design of M. Bonch-Bruyevich who was under investigation for (false) sabotage at that moment and whose name was apparently not allowed for mentioning.

UPTI and LEMO did not come back to Kharkiv in 1945 as separate entities; instead, LEMO had remained a department (later, a sector) inside UPTI till the final separation in 1955 [1a]. A. Slutskin had been remaining a staunch opponent of the separation of LEMO (that was pushed by K. Sinelnikov, the post-war director of UPTI with support of the 1-st Chief Directorate) until his death. He died unexpectedly in 1950 of the heart attack when waiting for a flight back from Moscow. He was very strong character and it is a mistake to believe that he was thinking about delegating his leadership in LEMO to Truten or Usikov. His most talented and high-positioned student at that moment (and later on) was S. Braude - the only one who had a higher doctorate (D.Sc., since 1943). In his last interview around 2000, Braude recalled how, in the late 1940s, Slutskin charged him with doing research into the microwave propagation but removed him from the magnetron research telling that magnetrons were to be pursued by Slutskin himself.

[1a] A.A. Kostenko, A.I. Nosich, Y.N. Ranyuk, "Prehistory of the IRE NASU", Science and Science of Science, Kiev, no. 4, pp. 102–135, 2005 (in Russian).

[2a] A.I. Nosich, A.A. Kostenko, "In the labor people's name: development of 60-kW magnetrons in the artificial famine plagued Ukraine in the early 1930s," Proc. Int. Conf. Origins and Evolution of the Cavity Magnetron (CAVMAG-2010), Bournemouth, 2010, pp. 82–88.

[3a] M.M. Lobanov, Beginning of the Soviet Radar, Sovetskoe Radio Publ., Moscow, 1975 (in Russian).

I did not write the above content; I just moved it from the article to here. – Jonesey95 (talk) 21:11, 2 September 2022 (UTC)