The National Science Center Kharkiv Institute of Physics and Technology (KIPT) (Ukrainian: Національний науковий центр «Харківський фізико-технічний інститут»), formerly the Ukrainian Physics and Technology Institute (UPTI) is the oldest and largest physical science research centre in Ukraine.[1] Today it is known as a science center as it consists of several institutes that are part of the Kharkiv Institute of Physics and Technology science complex.
The institute was founded on 30 October 1928, by the Government of Soviet Ukraine[2] on an initiative of Abram Ioffe[3] on the northern outskirts of Kharkiv (in khutir Piatykhatky) as the Ukrainian Institute of Physics and Technology for the purpose of research on nuclear physics and condensed matter physics.
From the moment of its creation, the institute was run by the People's Commissariat of Heavy Industry.
On 10 October 1932 the first experiments in nuclear fission in the Soviet Union were conducted here. The Soviet nuclear physicists Anton Valter, Georgiy Latyshev, Cyril Sinelnikov, and Aleksandr Leipunskii used a lithium atom nucleus. Later the Ukrainian Institute of Physics and Technology was able to obtain liquid hydrogen and helium. They also constructed the first triple coordinate radar station, and the institute became a pioneer of the Soviet high vacuum engineering which was developed into an industrial vacuum metallurgy.
During Stalin's Great Terror in 1938, the institute suffered the so-called UPTI Affair: three leading physicists of the Kharkiv Institute (Lev Landau, Yuri Rumer and Moisey Korets) were arrested by the Soviet secret police.[4]
The Ukrainian Institute of Physics and Technology was the "Laboratory no. 1" for nuclear physics, and was responsible for the first conceptual development of a nuclear bomb in the USSR.[3]
It was damaged by shelling during the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine,[5] [6] resulting in heavy damage to the Neutron Source nuclear facility.[7] [8]
Science and education institutions in Pyatykhatky.