Life
Born in a small town of Kolomna in Moscow region, Larkin went on to receive his education at the Moscow Engineering Physics Institute. He worked on his PhD on the properties of plasmas under the supervision of A.B.Migdal and later received the degree of Doctor of Science (1965) for studies of superconductivity.
Research at the I.V. Kurchatov Institute in Moscow (1957–66) was followed by nearly 40 years of work at the Landau Institute for Theoretical Physics in Chernogolovka, Moscow region, where he moved in 1966. During 1970–1991, he was also a professor at Moscow State University. Since 1995, Larkin was a professor of physics at the University of Minnesota and a member of William I. Fine Theoretical Physics Institute.
The dominant part of his work is devoted to superconductivity, magnetism, ferro-electricity, properties of metals, semiconductors and dielectrics. He pioneered the concept of spontaneous symmetry breaking in the physics of elementary particles, discovered collective pinning of magnetic flux in superconductors, predicted paraconductivity and effects of fluctuations on properties of superconductors, made essential contributions to the theory of weak localization, as well as developed the concept of the Ehrenfest time and out-of-time-ordered correlators in quantum chaos.
A.I. Larkin was the teacher of a large number of actively working theorists. His students and collaborators are teaching and conducting research in Russia, USA, Great Britain, France, Italy, Germany, Switzerland, Israel and other countries.
He died suddenly at 6pm on August 4, 2005, in Aspen, Colorado, where he was attending a physics workshop.
