Sketch of the scientific biography of the S. I. Vavilov State Optical Institute (on the 100th anniversary of its founding)

It has been a hundred years since the State Optical Institute (GOI), now known as AO S. I. Vavilov State Optical Institute, was founded. Reviewing the story of its birth, we see yet again how important for success in any great enterprise it is to combine the right epoch, the right moment, and the right man.
The first quarter of the Twentieth Century was primarily an epoch of establishing a culture of “total scientific research,” of establishing scientific research laboratories and then institutes as enterprises separate from education and production. This phenomenon can be regarded in the context of cultural development, but now it is more important to examine it from an economic viewpoint. This “industrial” method of attaining new knowledge turned out to be superprofitable for several decades from the viewpoint of how it affected technical progress in production, because of which it was endowed with the privilege of base financing. Society was already well aware of all this by 1918.
Second, this was the time of two great revolutions in physics and in natural science in general, in which a key role was played by optics—the inception and creation of the theory of relativity and quantum theory. Because of the topical nature of this journal, we shall not recall how GOI’s essential and “fundamental” achievements, which were predominantly in the region of spectroscopy, were largely limited by the technical, applied component.
The current moment, both epic and tragic, also promoted the organization of GOI. It became impossible in the years of the First World War for Russia to be supplied with technology from Germany. Thus, for example, the supply of X-ray tubes fabricated in Germany was quickly terminated, while the number of patients, alas, increased. The Soviet government enlisted A. F. Ioffe as a student of Roentgen and Professor D. S. Rozhdestvenskiı˘ of Petrograd University to solve this problem. The State Roentgenological and Radiological Institute (from which the Physics and Engineering Institute split off in 1921) and GOI appeared almost simultaneously in 1918. The State Optical Institute’s “first exploit” was associated with the circumstances of the First World War, and this strengthened its position. The military optics supplied to the Russian army from Germany was rapidly “knocked out” after the war began. The lower ranks at the front even had a kind of “business”: They captured binoculars in the German trenches and sold them to the officers. Difficulties in mastering the technology of optical glass made it hard to set up the fabrication of their optics. After GOI was enlisted in this problem, their business went well, and optical glass ceased to be imported in 1927.
The appearance, aspect, and fate of GOI are indissolubly associated with the personality of Dmitriı˘ Sergeevich Rozhdestvenskiı˘ (1876–1940)—its founder and director over the first two decades. Even before GOI was created, Rozhdestvenskiı˘ was distinguished among university physicists as a consistent adherent of the research paradigm. Among the few experimental projects carried out at Petrograd University before the revolution, his studies of atomic spectra by a new method, subsequently known as “Rozhdestvenskiı˘’s hook method,” are distinguished both by being critical and by the advanced technique of the experiment. It should be pointed out that regular research among the professors and lecturers was more likely to be an exception at that time, since their pedagogical load did not provide for them, and the entire experimental basis was restricted to a modest laboratory assistant who put together demonstration experiments for lectures. It can be assumed that it was during work in the evenings, along with working on the apparatus created for him, Dmitriı˘ Sergeevich formed a dream concerning the ideal optical research laboratory which he later implemented at GOI.
There were two important circumstances in this project that had a great effect on the subsequent fate of GOI. First, working under the conditions in Russia at that time, he became convinced that the development of advanced experimental physics was hampered in outdated technological surroundings (and Russia was indeed outdated in optical technologies); therefore, scientific and engineering work must actively coexist in an ideal scientific research institute. Rozhdestvenskiı˘ was convinced and subsequently defended the thesis that, in modern terminology, GOI must be based on a combination of fundamental and applied research. Second, optical apparatus, like an optical device, ordinarily embodies an entire complex of technologies (optical material, shaping, precision mechanics, etc.), and therefore an ideal optical research institute must develop in a complex way, with all possible optical disciplines and technologies. It is quitepossible that the initial source of his idea of complexity was his experience as an experimenter who had endured much from technical backwardness, rather than a premonition of innovation problems: In 1918 one that had only just disengaged from universities and scientific enterprises thought little about how it would turn out there.
However, in the 1930s, under conditions of accelerated industrialization, it was this range of experience accumulated until then that allowed GOI to become a brilliant instructor of the young optical industry and for many years to occupy the place of its leading scientific enterprise.
The complexity of GOI placed an imprint on its fate later, in the years of scientific–engineering parity with the West. In this period, GOI played a characteristic and important role of “first-sample generator” in Russia’s optical industry, already equipped with a system of scientific-research institutes (NIIs) Even if a new scientific or engineering idea arrived from abroad, a “junior scientific associate” conducting studies in a related area was likely to be found in some section of GOI. After switching technical sections and beefing up this specialization, he succeeded in a short time in creating the first sample of the item (often excelling the foreign prototype), and then entrusted subsequent development to the responsibilities of specialized NIIs and design offices of the section. This system was especially effective when the problem was complex and required the cooperation of several laboratories that were familiar with different optical technologies.
The traditional tendency of GOI to maximize the completeness of its optical topics had the effect that all the scientific and engineering revolutions and mini-revolutions that optics experienced in the Twentieth Century took a ride through GOI, leaving behind new laboratories, scientific schools, and specializations, so that the scientific history of the institute evolved in several major stages.
As already mentioned, the main problem that had to be solved at the first stage involved the technology of optical glass and its processing. Success in this area had tremendous significance for the subsequent fate of optics in Russia—the optical materials and coatings that form the technology now remain the deciding factors of progress in optics. It is important at present that, along with the production of glass at GOI, Russia’s scientific school of optical material science was created by the efforts of D. S. Rozhdestvenskiı˘, N. N Kachalov, and I. V. Prebenshchikov, managed in later years by G. T. Petrovskiı˘—a school that now maintains a world-class level of most Russian optical materials.
Simultaneously with the problem of optical materials, GOI had to develop the scientific bases for creating optomechanical systems. Even in the 1930s, GOI began to create excellent camera lenses, original microscopes (the Linnik interference microscope), telescopes (the Maksutov meniscus telescope), spectral
devices, etc.
The main thing that epoch left to GOI was most likely a world-class school of optical-system design and optical-engineering research (A. I. Tudorovskiı˘ and G. G. Slyusarev played a large role in creating it): 90% of the optical systems in the USSR were designed either at GOI or using GOI’s techniques. Experience in this area is now concentrated particularly in automatic design programs with a high reputation. Success in lens design and instrumentation is ensured not only by high-quality optical calculations, but also by a unique optical-engineering test-stand basis, whose main components are now computerized; this makes it possible to efficiently correct actual optical systems. The inventory of components for the designs and projects carried out at GOI remains very broad, including, among other things, objectives for UV photolithography, uncentered optical systems, systems with variable characteristics, and optical systems with diffraction and holographic elements.
The grievous war years came at GOI’s optomechanical stage of development, in which the GOI staff not only successfully developed and perfected samples of military optics, but also actively participated in the launch of optical production redeployed in the East.
In the 1940s and 50s, the “optoelectronic revolution” changed the entire aspect of optics. The State Optical Institute played an active part in virtually all of its episodes (it is especially necessary to point out the school of A. A. Lebedev). However, the institute was most strongly involved in developing the technology of the IR spectrum and thermal vision and occupied the leading position during the entire period when scanning thermal viewers were dominant. With the appearance of focal arrays of IR detectors, the problem of thermal vision became ever more “electronic,” but the demand for IR materials and objectives “from GOI,” as before, was high. The same years also saw the inception of fundamentally new optical specializations at GOI—for instance, adaptive optics (Linnik).
The 1960s marked several major events at once, the main one undoubtedly being the invention of the laser. Pouncing on this new region of optical science and engineering on the initiative of Lebedev, the GOI staff, which included not only wellknown specialists (A. A. Mak, V. V. Lyubimov, Yu. A. Anan’ev) but also young people, allowed the institute to share leadership in the development of laser physics with the institutes of the Academy of Sciences. The complexity and comprehensive character of the optical studies that characterized the institute thus allowed GOI to launch the first laser in the USSR (June 1961, L. D. Khazov). Responding to the need to improve devices for defense purposes, the institute’s staff members created a number of laser prototypes for ground- and air-based laser rangefinders and illumination systems, etc. and made enormous efforts to incorporate these new developments in the enterprises of optical industry, replacing the technologies that existed there at a new “laser” level. At the same time, theoretical studies in laser physics and engineering evolved and continue to evolve (the theory of cavities, nonlinear-optical effects, including spatial optical solitons, dynamic wave-front conjugation with nonlinear interactions, etc.). Now, when lasers and the topics associated with them have become relatively quiet but remain an enormous subtopic of optics, GOI specializes and has successes at a world level in several of its areas: oxygen-ion lasers with optical (including solar) pumping and the use of fullerenes, solid-state lasers with semiconductor pumping, lasers with vision-safe radiation, and wavelength-tunable lasers in the mid-IR (3-6μm) range. There is undoubted interest in current workat GOI for those interested in using lasers to correct the characteristics of optical systems, in the protection of vision from laser radiation, compact laser rangefinders, laser surgery, and nonlinear phenomena in laser-excited fluorescence.
Holography became one of the most substantial consequences of the “laser revolution” at GOI. A generalized version of this is holography in thick recording layers, invented by a GOI staff member, Academician Yu. N. Denisyuk (justly so, we should point out, because he created the first holograms in the prelaser epoch). Yuriı˘ Nikolaevich himself and his students in later years carried out pioneering work both on the foundations of holography (the development of methods of dense recording of the maximum possible number of holograms on a single carrier with no overlapping noise or edge effects, dynamic holography, holograms with nonlinear effects during reconstruction, holographic recording and reconstruction of rapidly varying optical signals, etc.), and on its applied specializations (the development of artistic holography, including color holography, the development of equipment for it, the search for new efficient media for recording steady-state and dynamic holograms, the development of fast optical switches based on holograms, the evolution of a technology for producing holographic optical elements, etc.).
Since the beginning of space flights, new broad possibilities of optically observing both space and the earth’s surface have opened up, and specific devices for navigation were required. The creation of most of the needed devices, including the most difficult—huge camera lenses—originated at GOI. Difficulties were caused not only by the extreme requirements on the characteristics of the devices, but also by the unusual conditions under which they operated. GOI was able to solve this problem by radically reconstructing the technology for constructing lenses that existed at that time. Enormous optical benches and chambers for testing were created, along with special optical and construction materials, which, in combination with special optical layouts developed by D. S. Volosov and coworkers, solved the main problem—that of the thermal stability of the objectives. Large mirror objectives were created in parallel with lens objectives; the need for these was associated with the use of absolutely new, nontraditional materials (beryllium, aluminum, silicon carbide, silicon) and earlier-unknown technologies for processing them with optical precision.
The first samples of Russia’s optical fibers, microchannel plates, and integrated circuits were obtained at GOI, but, with industrialization of the construction of fiber-optic communication lines, the institute subsequently collaborated on the development of special forms of optical fibers and bundles. The achievements of GOI include a fiber with increased mechanical strength, a single-mode quartz fiber with stable polarization and increased radiation strength, a photonicrystal fiber, a fiber with metallic coating that is stable when operated in an aggressive medium, and bundles for medical endoscopes that are not inferior in transparency, color rendition, or strength to the best foreign samples. The most important achievement was to master the technology of microchannel plates for light amplification.
Great innovations in optics have been associated with the evolution of computer engineering. Computer optics and spectroscopy were changed, and the growing possibilities of electronic and computer engineering caused the “temptation” to automate such an important and perfect human function as vision. The institute was included in the development that started in this area and at present successfully specializes in several areas: aerospace-image processing, video-data compression, automatic recognition systems, and electronic compensation of optical distortions. The computer has become the material basis for developing the idea created by M. M. Miroshnikov at GOI of a specialization called iconics (the study of the phenomenon of the optical image).
In enumerating favorite topics in historical sequence, we should mention a specialization that occupied a special place in GOI’s scientific biography from the very beginning— spectroscopy. Its evolution within the walls of the institute gave more than a few not only fundamental but also applied results in spectral analysis, the development of laser media, and the practical use of luminescence and magnetometry. The famous names of members of the Russian Academy of Sciences, A. N. Terenin, S. I. Vavilov, P. P. Feofilov, E. B. Aleksandrov, and A. M. Bonch-Bruevich and their schools are associated with this specialization.
Optics grew as the institute grew. At the beginning of the 1980s, the number of staff members reached a tremendous value for a scientific enterprise—12,000 people. A period of reorganization and disaggregation began. Problems soon appeared, associated with converting Russia to a market economy and cutting back on basic state financing. D. S. Rozhdestvenskiı˘’s basic principle of combining fundamental and applied sciences at GOI was substantially undermined, in spite of the fact that, without profound exploratory research, applied science is doomed to stagnate. Under market conditions and the struggle for viability, a great number of valuable specialists left the institute, spreading the banner of the GOI school over many universities and firms, while the disaggregation of GOI accelerated. There are now three actively interacting independent institutes, which remember and are proud of originating from “that great GOI.”
Of course, each of these institutes has its own perfectly new achievements, a partial picture of which can be obtained from the articles in this jubilee issue of the journal. However, we have decided not to enumerate them in this historical introduction: The triumphal advance of history and the expectations of the present day should not be commingled.

The Editorial Office of Opticheskiı˘ Zhurnal