Pyotr Leonidovich Kapitsa or Peter Kapitza FRS (Russian: Пётр Леонидович Капица, Romanian: Petre Capița; 9 July [O.S.

He subsequently studied in Britain, working for over ten years with Ernest Rutherford in the Cavendish Laboratory at the University of Cambridge, and founding the influential Kapitza club.

[9] In the 1920s he originated techniques for creating ultrastrong magnetic fields by injecting high current for brief periods into specially constructed air-core electromagnets.

[3] In 1934 Kapitsa returned to the USSR to visit his parents and to attend the Mendeleeff Congress, but the Soviet Union prevented him from travelling back to Great Britain.

Beginning with a letter to the editor of Science on 8 January 1938 where he reported the absence of measurable viscosity in liquid helium-4 cooled below 1.8 K, Kapitza documented the properties of helium-4 superfluid in a series of papers.

He invented high power microwave generators (1950–1955) and discovered a new kind of continuous high pressure plasma discharge with electron temperatures over 1,000,000 K.[citation needed] In November 1945 Kapitsa quarreled with Lavrentiy Beria, head of the NKVD and in charge of the Soviet atomic bomb project, writing to Joseph Stalin about Beria's ignorance of physics and his arrogance.

[12] Immediately after the war, a group of prominent Soviet scientists (including Kapitsa in particular) lobbied the government to create a new technical university, the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology.

He shared the prize with Arno Allan Penzias and Robert Woodrow Wilson, who won for discovering the cosmic microwave background.

Kapitsa was also the host of the popular and long-running Soviet scientific TV show Evident, but Incredible and was awarded UNESCO Kalinga Prize for it in 1979.

[19] Kapitsa had the ear of people high up in the Soviet government, due to the usefulness to industry of his discoveries, regularly writing letters on matters of science policy.