Igor Tamm

Igor Tamm was a Soviet theoretical physicist who worked alongside his student Andrei Sakharov to develop the Soviet Union's first thermonuclear weapon and to originate the tokamak concept, the magnetically confined toroidal plasma device that remains the world's leading design for an eventual fusion power reactor. Tamm led the theoretical group at the Lebedev Physical Institute that included Sakharov during the early 1950s hydrogen bomb project, and the two proposed the basic tokamak principle in 1950 and 1951, work later developed experimentally at the Kurchatov Institute under Lev Artsimovich. Tamm shared the 1958 Nobel Prize in Physics for a separate, earlier discovery, the theoretical explanation of the Cherenkov effect, made jointly with Ilya Frank and Pavel Cherenkov.