The Institute's Centenary

In 2018, the Ioffe Institute celebrated its centenary – 100 years ago, in September 1918, the Physics and Technology Division of the State Roentgenological and Radiological Institute, established on the initiative of Professors A.F. Ioffe and M.I. Nemenov, began its work at the Petrograd Polytechnic Institute of Emperor Peter the Great. Abram Fedorovich Ioffe was elected the first director of the SRRI and simultaneously headed the Physics and Technology Division. In 1921, the division became an independent institute. A.F. Ioffe remained the director of this institute until 1950.

In May 1939, the institute, under the name Leningrad Physics and Technology Institute (LPTI), became part of the USSR Academy of Sciences. In 1960, the name of the institute's first director was added to its title. The institute is rightfully considered the cradle of Soviet physics; future Nobel laureates N.N. Semenov, L.D. Landau, and P.L. Kapitsa began their scientific careers here, and world-renowned scientists such as A.P. Alexandrov, E.F. Gross, Ya.B. Zeldovich, I.V. Kurchatov, I.E. Tamm (also a future Nobel Prize winner), Ya.I. Frenkel, and many others worked here.

Work carried out at the institute has been awarded Nobel Prizes twice. In 1956, the Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to Academician N.N. Semenov (jointly with C.N. Hinshelwood) "for their researches into the mechanism of chemical reactions." This work was carried out at the Ioffe Institute and published in 1927 when N.N. Semenov was a staff member of the Institute. In 2000, the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to the Director of the Ioffe Institute, Academician Zhores I. Alferov (jointly with H. Kroemer and J. Kilby) for his work "that have laid the foundation of modern information technology, for the development of semiconductor heterostructures for optoelectronics."