Yevgeny Konstantinovich Zavoisky (Russian: Евгений Константинович Завойский; September 28, 1907 – October 9, 1976) was a Soviet physicist known for discovery of electron paramagnetic resonance in 1944.

[1][2] He likely observed nuclear magnetic resonance in 1941, well before Felix Bloch and Edward Mills Purcell, but dismissed the results as not reproducible.

[3][4] Zavoisky is also credited with design of luminescence camera for detection of nuclear processes in 1952 and discovery of magneto-acoustic resonance in plasma in 1958.

In 1910, Zavoisky family moved to Kazan – a major Russian university city – for the sake of better education and well-being of their five children.

Konstantin Ivanovich died in 1919 from exhaustion, and the family moved to a small rural town to survive the hunger period.

The seed germination topic was a reflection of that difficult period when scientists were required to try helping the Russian economy, which was recovering from the years of wars.

He formed a group of talented experimentalists and theorists of various background, which included Boris Kozyrev, A. V. Nesmelov and later Semen Altshuler.

[9] Eight years later, in 1946, Felix Bloch and Edward Mills Purcell refined the technique for use on liquids and solids, for which they shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1952.

This dramatically increased the detection sensitivity and allowed easy amplification of the resonance signal and outputting it directly to an oscilloscope.

Zavoisky demonstrated interference of polarized light in a biaxial crystal that resulted in an encircled swastika-like image projected onto the screen in front of a large audience.

The demonstration crystals were soon confiscated and analyzed by a special commission, seeking relation between the experiment and Nazi Germany, and only a series of letters from scientists settled the matter.