AWARDEE OF TECHNOLOGICAL SCIENCES PRIZE

LU MIN

Abstract

Lu Min, a nuclear physicist, was born in 1931 in Danyang, Jiangsu Province. He went to Sichuan with his parents during Japanese invasion, and spent his childhood there. He graduated from Jingling School in Nanjing in 1947 and went to Hangzhou to study in Zejiang University. He graduated from the Physics Department, Zejiang University in 1952, and then began on his scientific work in the Institute of Modern Physics. He studied the elementary particle physics with cosmic rays under the guiding of the well-known professor Wang Ganchang.
Lu Min went to the Soviet Union in 1959, joined the research work in the Joint Institute  of Nuclear Studies in Dubna. He did some elementary particle experiments at first, and then turned to work with the pulsed reactor, he studied experimentally the statistical fluctuation of the power pulses from the reactor.
When the soviet government suddenly withdraw all the experts in China including the nuclear experts in 1961, Lu Min and some others gave up the basic scientific research works in Dubna and went back to China to join the work of the nuclear weapon development in China. From then on, he worked at the nuclear test base in Xingjiang more than twenty years. He spent his main efforts to the physical diagnostic measurements in nuclear tests, he had worked as vice director of the institute and the director of the scientific and technical commission of the nuclear test base successively. From the first Chinese nuclear test he was responsible for the measurement of the parameter of the nuclear chain reaction, he and his group provided a lot of these important experimental data in tens of nuclear tests. While Chinese nuclear device became more complicate and Chinese nuclear tests were turned to underground, Lu Min proposed several important prompt diagnostic projects and presented the basic physical scheme of the measurements. Among the projects, there were determinations of the temperature of the fusion process by neutron measurements, determinations of the geometric configuration of the fusion material by the pinhole imaging and so on. Lu  Min also proposed the comprehensive steel rack project for the shaft type underground nuclear tests in China, which is suitable for multiple physical diagnostic measurements. All the proposals had been succeeded, and the technical level of our nuclear tests significantly improved, it made an important contribution to the development of our nuclear weapons. For these works Lu  Min  won the government prizes of the science and technology progress several times.
Lu Min caught serious ill in 1986, he had been sent to Beijing for medical treatments. After leave from the hospital, he worked as a research fellow of the Institute of Systematic Engineering, the Commission of Defense Science and Technology for National Defense. Now he is responsible for the study of the radiation hardening, and at the same time he joins the research work related to scientific and technical problems of arms control.