Physicists and astronomers

Yulii Khariton

Yulii Khariton, also known as Yulii Borisovich Khariton, was a Soviet physicist who led the design of the first Soviet atomic bomb, RDS-1, tested in 1949.

Yuri A. Ossipyan

Yuri A. Ossipyan, also known as Yuri Andreevich Ossipyan, was a Soviet and Russian physicist who discovered the photoplastic effect and led the Institute of Solid State Physics in Chernogolovka.

Yuri A. Vdovin

Yuri A. Vdovin is a physicist who independently showed in 1963 that the lower-energy p-wave pair state is the BW state, later identified with superfluid helium-3's B phase.

Yuri Kivshar, also known as Yuri S. Kivshar, is an Australian and Ukrainian physicist, a Distinguished Professor at the Australian National University working on nonlinear physics, metamaterials, and nanophotonics.

Yuri Oganessian

Yuri Oganessian, born 1933, is a Russian nuclear physicist at JINR in Dubna who led the synthesis of superheavy elements 114 through 118 using hot fusion.

Yuri Osipyan

Yuri Andreevich Osipyan (Юрий Андреевич Осипьян; 1931–2008) was a Soviet and Russian solid-state physicist who discovered the photoplastic effect and led the Institute of Solid State Physics in Chernogolovka for 29 years.

Yuri Y. Shprits

Yuri Y. Shprits is a space physicist who heads the Space Physics and Space Weather section at GFZ in Potsdam and is a professor at the University of Potsdam.

Yuriy Aleksandrovich Pashkin

Yuriy Aleksandrovich Pashkin (Пашкин Юрий Александрович) is a Russian-born condensed matter physicist at Lancaster University, co-performer of the first solid-state qubit oscillation experiment in 1999.

Yuriy Sharvin

Yuriy Sharvin (Юрий Васильевич Шарвин) was a Soviet low-temperature physicist at the Kapitza Institute in Moscow, best known for founding point-contact electron focusing and the Sharvin conductance in metals.

Yusheng Zhao

Yusheng Zhao (赵予生) is a Chinese high-pressure physicist and materials scientist who led Los Alamos' high-pressure team and became Chair Professor at the Eastern Institute of Technology, Ningbo, in 2023.

Yuval Gefen

Yuval Gefen is an Israeli condensed matter physicist and emeritus professor at the Weizmann Institute of Science, known for work on mesoscopic physics and quantum measurement.

Yuval Ne'eman

Yuval Ne'eman (1925–2006) was an Israeli theoretical physicist who independently co-discovered the SU(3) Eightfold Way classification of hadrons, founded Tel Aviv University's physics department, and later served as a government minister.

Yves F. Dufrêne

Yves F. Dufrêne is a Belgian nanobiophysicist, FNRS Research Director and professor at UCLouvain, known for using atomic force microscopy to study living microbial cells.

Yvonne Elsworth

Yvonne Elsworth is a physicist and Professor of Helioseismology at the University of Birmingham, leading the BiSON network that probes the Sun's interior with sound waves.

Z. J. John Stekly

Z. J. John Stekley, born Zdenek J. J. Stekly (1933–2009), was a Czech-born American mechanical engineer who led Magnetic Corporation of America and developed the Stekly Stability Criterion for superconducting wire.

Zenji Hiroi

Zenji Hiroi (廣井善二) is a Japanese condensed matter physicist and professor at the University of Tokyo's Institute for Solid State Physics, known for discovering pyrochlore oxide superconductors.

Zetian Mi

Zetian Mi is a Chinese-born American engineer and materials scientist at the University of Michigan known for III-nitride nanowire photocatalysts that split water into solar hydrogen.

Zhang Shuangnan

Zhang Shuangnan (张双南), born 1962, is a Chinese high-energy astrophysicist who directs the Center for Particle Astrophysics and is chief scientist of China's Insight-HXMT X-ray satellite.

Zhangbu Xu

Zhangbu Xu is a high-energy nuclear physicist who studies the quark-gluon plasma at Brookhaven's RHIC, was STAR spokesperson from 2014 to 2017, and joined Kent State in 2024.

Zhaowei Liu

Zhaowei Liu is a professor of electrical and computer engineering at UC San Diego who joined in 2008, known for optical superlenses, hyperlenses, and hyperbolic metamaterials.

Zhen-Gang Wang

Zhen-Gang Wang is a chemical engineer at Caltech, the Dick and Barbara Dickinson Professor, elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2025 for his theories of polymer phase behavior and self-assembly.

Zheng-Cheng Gu

Zheng-Cheng Gu (顾正澄) is a Hong Kong condensed matter physicist at The Chinese University of Hong Kong known for work on symmetry-protected topological phases and tensor networks.

Zhenhua Ni

Zhenhua Ni (倪振华) is a Chinese physicist known for Raman spectroscopy and optoelectronics of graphene and two-dimensional materials, and a professor at Southeast University since 2010.

Zhi-Xun Shen

Zhi-Xun Shen, born 1962, is a Chinese-born condensed matter physicist and Paul Pigott Professor at Stanford, known for ARPES studies of superconductors and elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2015.

Zhifeng Ren

Zhifeng Ren is a physicist at the University of Houston, where he directs the Texas Center for Superconductivity and researches thermoelectric materials, water-splitting catalysts, and new superconductors.

Zhihong Lin

Zhihong Lin is a computational plasma physicist, Chancellor's Professor at UC Irvine, known for global gyrokinetic simulations of fusion plasma turbulence and for developing the Gyrokinetic Toroidal Code (GTC).

Zhipei Sun

Zhipei Sun is a Finnish-based photonics professor at Aalto University in Espoo who works on nanophotonics with graphene and other two-dimensional materials, and is known for miniaturized spectrometers.

Zhores Alferov

Zhores Alferov (Жорес Иванович Алфёров) was a Soviet and Russian physicist at the Ioffe Institute in St Petersburg who shared the 2000 Nobel Prize in Physics for semiconductor heterostructures.

Zhores I. Alfërov

Zhores I. Alfërov, full name Zhores Ivanovich Alferov, was a Soviet and Russian physicist who shared the 2000 Nobel Prize in Physics for semiconductor heterostructures.