Lev Shubnikov

Who was Lev Shubnikov?

Lev Vasilyevich Shubnikov was a Soviet experimental physicist who worked in the Netherlands and USSR.

Shubnikov was born into the family of a Saint Petersburg accountant. After graduating from a gymnasium he entered Leningrad University. This was the first year of the Russian Civil War and he was the only student of that year attending the physics department. While yachting in the Gulf of Finland in 1921, he accidentally sailed from Saint Petersburg to Finland, was sent to Germany and could not return to Russia until 1922. He then continued his education in the Leningrad Polytechnical Institute, graduating in 1926. During his university training he worked with Ivan Obreimov, developing a new method for growing monocrystals of metals.

In 1926, at the recommendation of Abram Ioffe, he was sent to the Leiden cryogenic laboratory of Wander Johannes de Haas in the Netherlands; he worked there until 1930. Shubnikov studied bismuth crystals with low impurity concentrations, and in cooperation with Wander Johannes de Haas he discovered magnetoresistance oscillations at low temperatures in magnetic fields.