Pavel Cherenkov

Pavel Alekseyevich Cherenkov was a Soviet physicist. While working under S. I. Vavilov in 1934, he observed a faint blue light emitted from a bottle of water exposed to radioactive bombardment, later understood as light given off by charged particles moving through a medium faster than light's phase velocity in that medium, the effect that now bears his name. He shared the 1958 Nobel Prize in Physics with Ilya Frank and Igor Tamm for the discovery and interpretation of the Cherenkov effect.