Lev Okun

Who is Lev Okun?

Lev Borisovich Okun is a Russian theoretical physicist.

He was born in Sukhinichi in 1929 in the Soviet Union, and graduated from Moscow Mechanical Institute in 1953 where he was a student of Arkady Migdal and later a graduate student of Isaak Pomeranchuk. He has worked since 1954 at the Institute of Theoretical and Experimental Physics in Moscow and has published some 300 papers, and several books, on the theory of elementary particles.

Okun introduced the term "hadron" in a plenary talk at the 1962 International Conference on High Energy Physics. In this talk he said:

Not withstanding the fact that this report deals with weak interactions, we shall frequently have to speak of strongly interacting particles. These particles pose not only numerous scientific problems, but also a terminological problem. The point is that "strongly interacting particles" is a very clumsy term which does not yield itself to the formation of an adjective. For this reason, to take but one instance, decays into strongly interacting particles are called non-leptonic. This definition is not exact because "non-leptonic" may also signify "photonic".