Sena, Lev Aronovich

Born in Vilna on December 28, 1907. Father Aron Leibovich Sena worked as a tutor in mathematics, the Russian language and Latin . Mother is a housewife. The family lived on Kavkazskaya Street, house number 10. In 1915, the family moved to Petrograd .

After leaving school in 1923, Lev Aronovich was one of three hundred graduates whom the Petrograd provincial department of public education sent, on the recommendation of school directors, without examinations to higher educational institutions.

In 1930, Sena graduated from the Physics and Mechanics Department of the Leningrad Polytechnic Institute with a degree in experimental physics and remained working in it, having gone from a teacher of physics (1929-1930), an assistant (1930-1938), and an assistant professor (1938— 1948) to the professor (1948-1949).

While still a student, on October 20, 1929, at the same Leningrad Polytechnic Institute, he began teaching, which he worked until the end of his life.

In the fall of 1933, Lev Aronovich was invited to work in his laboratory by corresponding member of the USSR Academy of Sciences Dmitry Apollinarievich Rozhansky , under whose leadership Sena began research in the field of low-temperature plasma physics .

Subsequently, this work served as the basis for his Ph.D. thesis on “Energy of Positive Ions in a Gas Discharge Plasma”, which was defended in 1938 .

In 1939, Sena began working as an assistant professor at the newly organized Department of Technical Electronics at the Polytechnic Institute, and in the fall of 1940, after the death of the department’s founder P.S. Tartakovsky, he headed it as the acting head.

The entire blockade, Lev Aronovich worked in Leningrad. Being seconded to Lentramvai , he participated in the restoration of tram substations ( Central (Komsomolskaya) , Klinskaya, Nekrasovskaya, Lesnaya), without which it would not be possible to launch a blockade tram (first freight tram - on March 7, 1942, and then on April 15 - passenger) . Memories of the work done to restore the substations ^[1] are preserved. Until the end of his life, he maintained warm relations with blockade trams.

In September 1943, he delivered the first lecture after the resumption of higher education institutions at the LIIZhT (Institute of Railway Engineers), where he headed the Department of Physics during the war.

He defended his doctoral dissertation on the theme “Interaction and motion of charged particles in a gas” in 1947 . On March 24, 1948, the Higher Attestation Commission awarded L. A. Sen a doctorate in physical and mathematical sciences.

In 1951, a case was instituted against Leo Sen, as well as V. E. Skobelev and Ya. S. Gallay under Articles 58-10, Part 1 and 58-11 of the Criminal Code of the RSFSR . In July 1951, Sena, Skobelev and Gallay were arrested. On February 16, 1952, L. A. Sena was sentenced to 10 years in camps, with subsequent loss of rights for 5 years.

In conclusion, Sena worked in a prison missile design bureau in Moscow . The decision of the Judicial Collegium on Criminal Cases of the Supreme Court of the USSR of August 22, 1953 quashed the verdict against L. A. Sen, V. E. Skobelev and Ya. S. Gallay “... for dismissal of the case by proceedings”. Sen was only released from prison on October 8, 1953, and received a certificate of rehabilitation from the Supreme Court of the USSR on November 14, 1990 .

From September 1954 to February 1962, he headed the Department of Physics of the Leningrad Higher Naval Order of Lenin Engineering School named after Dzerzhinsky. Since February 1962, he headed the Department of Physics of the Leningrad Electrotechnical Institute of Communications named after Bonch-Bruevich .

In 1965, Lev Aronovich Sena accepted the invitation to take the post of professor at the Department of Physics of the Leningrad Mining Institute. Plekhanov with the simultaneous opening of the laboratory, the scientific leader of which he remained until his death.

Leo Sen is known as the author of the eponymous effect in low-temperature plasma. The effect consists in charge transfer as a result of resonant charge exchange, when there is no elastic scattering of an ion by an atom ^{[2] [3]} .

In 1931, together with Yakov Zeldovich published a joint work in the German-language journal Physikalishe Zeitschrift der Sovjetunion.

In total, L. A. Sen published more than 200 scientific articles, 2 monographs, 6 books, and many teaching aids.

Leo Sen had many students, including Academician Gennady Andreyevich Mesyats , Director of the Lebedev Physical Institute, B. M. Smirnov, G. N. Fursey, Yu. D. Khromoi, Lithuanian L. I. Pranevichus, Ukrainians B. M. Palyukh and V I. Chigin, Azerbaijanis S. Askerov, N. Mammadov and D. Nasrullaev, Austrian I. Mitterauer and many others.

The official scientific school of Leo Sen is 2 doctors and 15 candidates of sciences ^[4] .

In the mid-1930s, Leo Sena became interested in mountaineering . Several times he went to mountain camps in the Caucasus . It was there, in Dombay, at the Polyana LII ( Leningrad Industrial Institute - the Polytechnic used to be called at one time) that Leo Sen composed the famous Cold Overnight (I’ve been sitting and suffering the whole night ...) - a climbing song with which, as many admit, The history of the author’s song in the Soviet Union began.

• Sena L. A. Units of physical quantities and their dimensions / Educational-reference manual. - 3rd ed., Revised. and add. - M .: Nauka, 1988 .-- 432 p. - ISBN 5-02-013848-7 .

• Professor Lev Aronovich Sena