Their names are in the history of the Institute

Remembering Professor Yu.V.Zanevsky

1 January marked the 85th anniversary of the birth of Professor Yury Vatslavovich Zanevsky, Doctor of Technical Sciences, Honored Scientist of the Russian Federation. He dedicated more than five decades of his life to our Institute that has become one of the largest and most authoritative scientific centres in the world. Yu.V.Zanevsky was awarded the title of Honorary Doctor of JINR. For several generations of physicists, he became a symbol of JINR and an entire era in its history.

Yury Vatslavovich was born on 1 January, 1939, in Minsk in the family of a military man and a teacher of Russian language and literature. While still a child, he forever remembered the difficult times of the Great Patriotic War that among other things, influenced the choice of his life path. He graduated from boys' school No.5 with a silver medal in the city of Makhachkala, Dagestan Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic. His photograph was kept for a long time on the Honor Board among the best graduates in the main foyer of this educational institution.

Immediately after graduating from school in 1955, following the example of his military father, Yu.V.Zanevsky entered the Leningrad Higher Naval Engineering School named after F.E.Dzerzhinsky. However, after studying for just over two years, he realized that he wanted to become a physicist. And in 1958, having successfully passed the entrance exams, he became a student in the department of electronic instruments and devices at the Leningrad Electrotechnical Institute named after V.I.Ulyanov (LETI). This choice was not accidental: Yury Vatslavovich's interest in physics clearly manifested itself during his school years. He enjoyed studying in physics and mathematics clubs in high school and one of his favorite sections of the school curriculum in physics lessons was optics.

In 1962, after having graduated from LETI, Yu.V.Zanevsky was assigned to Dubna. He recalled: "The small town that Dubna was at that time made a very pleasant impression - quiet, cozy, with a beautiful embankment and a well-established way of life. On the city beach you could rent a boat while watching how professors and future academicians mastered water skiing." From that moment until the last days, Yury Vatslavovich's inextricable ties with Dubna and JINR continued.

At JINR, Yury Vatslavovich began his career at the High Energy Laboratory as a laboratory assistant. In 1968, he defended his Ph.D. thesis and by that time, he had finally decided on the specialization with which his entire future scientific career was related to - the physics of detection of elementary particles.

In 1975, Yu.V.Zanevsky became a Doctor of Physical and Mathematical Sciences and headed work in the sector on the development and research of large automated detection systems based on wire chambers for experiments in high energy physics and applied research. The radiation detection techniques developed by him and his team to this day are the basis of the work of many large nuclear physics facilities at accelerators, in crystallography, medicine and other advanced areas of modern science, using which important results were obtained.

Together with his colleagues, Yu.V.Zanevsky developed detectors that allowed to speed up diffraction experiments with protein single crystals by two orders of magnitude. At the Institute of Crystallography of the Russian Academy of Sciences, using jointly developed diffractometers, more than 200 protein single crystals were studied in a short period of time and new information was obtained about their structure that became an important step in this field of science.

In the field of radiochromatography, according to a resolution of the USSR Council of Ministers, a series of devices was developed and manufactured for the express analysis of chromatograms in biology labeled with radioactive isotopes. This series of papers was awarded a gold medal from the USSR Exhibition of Economic Achievements (1978) and a prize from the USSR Council of Ministers (1986).

The work of Yury Vatslavovich on the use of a helium ion beam for low-dose radiography aroused great interest among the scientific community. In the field of neutron radiography, under his supervision, a position-sensitive detector for a polarized neutron spectrometer was developed. FLNP staff members together with colleagues from the Laue-Langevin Institute (Grenoble, France) successfully used this detector at IBR-2 for experimental research on the refraction and reflection of neutrons in a magnetically non-collinear medium, magnetic non-specular scattering from multilayer structures and small-angle scattering of polarized neutrons.

Of the many things that Professor Zanevsky did, the 40th LHE building has a special role - a modern technological laboratory for the development and research of detectors, where more than 100 TRD transition radiation detector chambers were designed and tested for the ALICE project (CERN).

Yu.V.Zanevsky made a great contribution to the process of training young physicists. Under his supervision, the paper "Imaging Detectors" was prepared that was presented at five international ICFA schools (Rio de Janeiro, Trieste, Bombay, Ljubljana, Leon/Mexico) between 1990 and 2002. Such detectors for teaching students of higher educational institutions were installed at KTH (Stockholm, 1996), IEF (Debrecen, 2000) and UC JINR (Dubna, 2002).

Yury Vatslavovich is a winner of the USSR Council of Ministers Prize, a winner of ten JINR prizes, the author of a monograph on coordinate detectors, co-author of more than 200 published papers and three inventions. For about 10 years, he worked on the international editorial board of the European journal Physica Medica.

Yury Vatslavovich was a very principled, decisive and honest person. He did not tolerate compromises with his conscience, but at the same time, he understood people well and treated everyone with great kindness and attention. He was characterized by rare courage and willpower. And in recent weeks that turned out to be the most difficult test for him and his family, these qualities also manifested themselves in full. He lived together with his wife Lyubov Aleksandrovna Zanevskaya for more than 40 years, brought up two sons Alexander and Dmitry. Despite being very busy at work, he was a caring husband and father. The memory of Yury Vatslavovich will always live in our hearts.

Staff members and colleagues of the Sector