Gurgen Askaryan
New insights into light and high-energy radiation
Gurgen Askaryan was a physicist of Armenian descent, born in 1928. His work at Moscow’s Lebedev Physical Institute encompassed nonlinear optics and radiation from particles.
He made important contributions to the study of light self-focusing, in which an intense beam changes a medium’s optical properties and thereby affects its own propagation. A separate prediction was the Askaryan effect: coherent radio emission arising from a charge imbalance in particle showers.
The latter phenomenon was subsequently confirmed experimentally and became a tool for investigating extremely energetic particles. Askaryan died in 1997. His ideas show how a theoretical prediction can open new possibilities for measurement.