Walter, Anton

Walter, Anton or Valter [Вальтер, Антон], b 24 December 1905 in Saint Petersburg, d 13 July 1965 in Kharkiv. Experimental physicist; full member of the Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian SSR from 1951. A graduate of the Leningrad Polytechnical Institute (1926), in 1930 he joined the Ukrainian Physical-Technical Institute in Kharkiv, where he became centrally involved in the development and construction of nuclear-particle accelerators. In 1932 Walter was a member of the research group (with Georgii Latyshev, Aleksandr Leipunsky, and Kyrylo Synelnykov) that accomplished for the first time in the USSR the transmutation of one stable nucleus (lithium) into another (helium). Walter became a leading specialist in accelerator design and in associated vacuum and high-voltage technology. In 1937, together with Synelnykov, he built a 2.5-MeV electrostatic particle accelerator, which at the time was the most powerful in Europe. After the Second World War, Walter contributed significantly to the design of the Kharkiv 2-GeV linear electron accelerator. From 1937 he was a professor at Kharkiv University.

[This article originally appeared in the Encyclopedia of Ukraine, vol. 5 (1993).]