Lev Artsimovich

Lev Artsimovich was a Soviet physicist widely regarded as the father of the tokamak, the toroidal magnetic confinement device that became the dominant experimental approach to controlled nuclear fusion power. Building on the concept proposed by Igor Tamm and Andrei Sakharov, Artsimovich led the Kurchatov Institute's plasma physics program through the 1950s and 1960s, overseeing the series of experimental tokamaks that culminated in the T-3 device. T-3's 1968 results, showing plasma temperatures and confinement times far ahead of contemporary Western fusion experiments, were confirmed independently by a visiting British team from Culham using laser scattering measurements in 1969, a result that convinced fusion researchers worldwide to switch their own programs to the tokamak design.