Yuri Fyodorovich Orlov

Yuri F. Orlov was Professor Emeritus of Physics at Cornell University, where from 1987 to 2008 he was a Senior Scientist in the Laboratory of Nuclear Studies. Best known as a Soviet dissident and human rights activist, Orlov made important contributions to particle accelerator design, beam interaction analysis and quantum mechanics. He was among the first physicists to recognize the importance of nonlinearities in the motion of particles in accelerators, and he designed a very high energy electron-positron collider in Yerevan, Armenia, in the 1970s, a concept far ahead of its time. At CERN he discovered that ion trapping prevented the proton-antiproton collider from reaching its design performance and suggested a successful technique, now standard, for clearing ions as well as a theoretical explanation. In the 1970s he co-founded the Moscow chapter of Amnesty International and founded the Helsinki Watch group there as well, which led to his imprisonment in the Soviet Gulag beginning in 1978. He was stripped of his Soviet citizenship and expelled from the country in 1986, when he was offered a position at Cornell. His role in the Soviet dissident movement ranks alongside those of Andrei Sakharov and Anatol (now Natan) Sharansky, and he has continued to be active in the international human rights movement since the collapse of the USSR.

Orlov has received honorary doctorates from Uppsala University in Sweden, York University in Toronto, and New York University. His memoir, Dangerous Thoughts, was published in 1992. In 2006 Orlov became the first recipient of the Andrei Sakharov Prize from the American Physical Society. Shortly before his death, he was awarded the American Physical Society’s 2021 Wilson Prize, an esteemed award in the field of particle accelerator physics.