CLASSE: News and Events

Skip to content

We’ve built a new site! You can make your way there by clicking here.
If you are having trouble finding what you need, please email comms-classe@cornell.edu.

CORNELL LABORATORY FOR ACCELERATOR-BASED SCIENCES AND EDUCATION

CLASSE NEWS | 22 Sep 2015

Celebration of Yuri Orlov on the occasion of his retirement

<noautolink>Orlov photo.jpg</noautolink>

On September 16, 2015 CLASSE and LEPP celebrated the extraordinary career of Professor Yuri Orlov on the occasion of his recent retirement. After a short overview of Professor Orlov's eventful biography, LEPP Director Jim Alexander expressed the appreciation of his colleagues to Orlov. This was followed by personal recollection of Kurt Gottfried, Maury Tigner, Matthew Evangelista from the Department of Government Studies and Slava Paperno from the Russian Language Program.

Yuri Orlov, Professor of Physics and Government, began his long and eventful physics career as a student of Landau and Kapitsa in Moscow, where he went on to design the first proton-synchrotron in Russia. A pro-democracy speech in 1956 led to him being fired and exiled from Moscow for 16 years, during which time he became the founding father of Armenian accelerator physics in Yerevan. After being permitted to return to Moscow in the early 70's, he established the first Helsinki Watch Group in the Soviet Union, which led to his arrest by the KGB, labor camp and Siberian exile. He continued his scientific work even in camp. After his deportation to the United States in 1986, Orlov joined the accelerator physics efforts at Cornell as a senior scientist and later became professor of physics and government. He was an instrumental member of the muon g-2 group at Brookhaven and Fermilab, work he continues to this day, along with his work on electric dipole moments, foundations of quantum mechanics, gravitation and human rights.