November of 2012 marks the 120th birth anniversary of Dmitry Vladimirovich Skobeltsyn (1892-1990), a great Russian physicist who has formed a major scientific school in nuclear physics, elementary particles and cosmic rays. Dmitry Skobeltsyn. Early 1960s. Photo from the site of the Skobeltsyn Research Institute of Nuclear Physics. стр. 33 Upon his graduation from the Department of Physics and Mathematics of Petrograd (St. Petersburg) University, Dmitry Skobeltsyn was selected as a candidate for professorship at the Physics Chair. Combining research with teaching, he started out as a research fellow at the Leningrad College of Physics and Technology (Ioffe Institute of Physics and Technology today). His first experiments dealt with the Kompton phenomenon. In 1923 Arthur H. Compton, a US physicist (Nobel Prize in physics, 1927) discovered what became known as the Compton phenomenon. Thereby he laid a groundwork for the Compton scattering theory, i.e. microwave scattering on a free electron. Skobeltsyn showed a great interest for the interaction of gamma rays of radioactive substances, thought to be the hardest radiation at the time, with electrons. He found an apt methodic approach by using a Wilson cloud chamber placed in a static magnetic field for quantitative analysis of the interaction of relativistic particles with a substance. Experimenting, the young physicist concluded the Compton theory agreed, both in qualitative and quantitative terms, with the phenomenon of interaction of radiation quanta with free electrons. The Skobeltsyn method made it possible to discover a number of elementary particles and study many essential high-energy processes. Subsequently Skobeltsyn applied the Compton phenomenon in spectroscopy of γ-rays. This paved the way to further research in β- and γ-rays spectra, and brought important theoretical and practical results. By and large, Skobeltsyn concentrated on cosmic radiation. Examining shots t ... Читать далее