Abram Isaakovich Alikhanov (Russian: Абрам Исаакович Алиханов, born Alikhanian; 4 March 1904 – 8 December 1970) was a Soviet Armenian experimental physicist who specialized in particle and nuclear physics.

Between 1945 and 1968 he directed the Institute for Theoretical and Experimental Physics (ITEP) in Moscow, which was named after him in 2004.

In 1934 he and Igor Kurchatov created a "baby cyclotron", the first "cyclotron" operating outside of Berkeley, California.

He was the driving force behind the construction of the 70 GeV synchrotron in Serpukhov (1967), the largest in the world at the time.

Alikhanov was born Abraham Alikhanian (Armenian: Աբրահամ Ալիխանյան) on 4 March 1904 in Elisabethpol (today Ganja, Azerbaijan) to Armenian parents.

The family then moved to Tiflis (today Tbilisi), where they lived until 1918.

They returned to Tiflis and Abram graduated from a Tiflis commercial college in 1921.

In 1923 Alikhanov moved to Leningrad and enrolled in the chemistry department of the Polytechnic Institute.

In 1924 he transferred to the department of physics and mechanics, founded by Abram Ioffe.

He graduated in 1929.He was awarded a PhD in Physical and Mathematical Sciences in 1935.

He lectured at the St. Petersburg State Transport University in 1939–41 and chaired the Department of Physics there.

In 1927 Alikhanov began working part-time at the Physical-Technical Institute in Leningrad as a researcher focusing on X-rays, X-ray diffraction, and solid-state physics.

In 1929 he published his first paper on the use of X-ray analysis in investigating the crystal structure of the copper-aluminum alloy.

In 1929, after graduating from the Polytechnic Institute, he was employed by the Physical-Technical Institute full-time.

He began a long-time collaboration with his younger brother, Artem, and Lev Artsimovich in 1930.

Under the supervision of Pyotr Ivanovich Lukirskii, head of the X-ray laboratory, Alikhanov and Artsimovich studied X-ray optics from 1930 to 1933.

Alikhanov summarized the results in a 1933 monograph titled X-Ray Optics (Оптика рентгеновских лучей).

Alikhanov switched to nuclear physics in 1933, following the discovery of the neutron and the positron in 1932.

In 1938 Alikhanov discovered a new method of determining the rest mass of the neutrino using decay of the nuclei of 7Be.

Alikhanov planned to study cosmic rays, the only source of high-energy particles known at that time, in the Pamir Mountains in the summer of 1941, however, due to the approaching Nazi forces, Alikhanov and the Institute for Physical Problems were evacuated to Kazan in October 1941.

In April 1942 he moved to Yerevan, Soviet Armenia with the intention to study cosmic rays at Mount Aragats.

Turkevich noted in 1956 that "this claim was questioned in the West and attacked by a group of Soviet physicists, with a subsequent bitter polemic in the Soviet physics journals.

After the Soviet authorities learned of the German, British and American programs of nuclear weapons in mid-1942, works began on the Soviet project led by Igor Kurchatov.

In August 1945 the Special Committee under the Council of Ministers (Council of People's Commissars) was formed to oversee works on uranium.

On December 1, 1945 Laboratory no. 3 of the Soviet Academy of Sciences was established in Moscow with Alikhanov as its head.

The laboratory was renamed to Heat-Engineering Laboratory (Теплотехническая лаборатория) in 1949 and received its modern name, the Institute for Theoretical and Experimental Physics (ITEP), in 1958.

Alikhanov lead the institute for 23 years, until he retired in 1968.

With a small staff, Alikhanov led the design of the first reactor by 1947.

It was built in 1948 and successfully put into operation on April 25, 1949.

In 1959 Alikhanov led the design of 10 MW experimental research heavy-water reactors, which were built in China and Yugoslavia under his supervision.

Named OK-180, it was commissioned in October 1951 in Chelyabinsk-65.

By 1952, after the completion of the heavy-water reactor, the main direction of Alikhanov's institute became construction of a high-energy accelerator.

A proton accelerator with a strong focusing of 7 GeV (gigaelectronvolt) was completed and commissioned at the institute in 1961.

The Serpukhov accelerator was commissioned in 1967 and became the largest proton accelerator in the world at the time.

The Serpukhov accelerator, construction on which had begun in 1960, was transferred to the Institute for High Energy Physics (IHEP).

He had two children with his first wife, Anna Grigorievna Prokofieva, who he married in 1925.

Tigran served as rector (president) of the Moscow Conservatory in 2005–09.Alikhanov suffered a stroke in 1964.

He resigned from his post as director of the ITEP in 1968.

Alikhanov died in Moscow on December 8, 1970 at the age of 66.

In 1956 Alikhanov came under pressure when several members of the ITEP staff gave pro-democracy speeches at the institute's Communist Party organization.

Orlov noted that after Khrushchev's denunciation of Stalin in 1956, Alikhanov was among "some 20-30 leading physicists" who "were very active in writing collective letters (not for publication, of course) to the leaders protesting attempts to restore or protect Stalinism" when "the majority of scientists were afraid to participate in such activity."

In March 1966 he joined Pyotr Kapitsa, Andrei Sakharov and others calling on Leonid Brezhnev not to rehabilitate Stalin.

The Institute for Theoretical and Experimental Physics, which Alikhanov led from its inception in 1945 until 1968, was named after him in 2004.Alikhanov is widely recognized as one of the leading Soviet physicists.

A 1974 obituary in Soviet Physics Uspekhi called Alikhanov "one of the founders of nuclear physics in our country."

In a November 1945 letter to Stalin, Pyotr Kapitsa wrote: "Comrades Alikhanov, Ioffe, and Kurchatov are as competent as I or even more so."

Archived from the original on 19 July 2019.