Russian physicist Pavel Cherenkov won the Nobel Prize in physics in 1958. Cherenkov discovered that certain liquids will glow when irradiated with gamma rays.
Pavel Alekseyevich Cherenkov (1904-1990), Russian physicist and Nobel laureate. In 1932 he began to study the luminescence given off by certain liquids when irradiated by gamma rays and, in 1934, discovered a phenomenon now known as the Cherenkov effect. This phenomenon (also called Cherenkov radiation) is the emission of a bluish light from a liquid when electrons or other charged atomic particles move through the liquid with a velocity greater than that of light in the same medium. That is, the velocity of light, c, is reduced to the velocity c/n in a dialectric medium, where n is the refractive index of the medium. If a particle enters the medium at a velocity very nearly that of c, its velocity can then exceed c in that medium. Radiation detectors called Cherenkov counters make use of this phenomenon. In 1958 Cherenkov shared the Nobel Prize in physics with Ilya M. Frank and Igor Y. Tamm for the discovery of the Cherenkov effect.
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