Background
Eduard Vladimirovich Shpolsky was born on November 24, 1892 in Voronezh, Russian Federation.
Eduard Vladimirovich Shpolsky was born on November 24, 1892 in Voronezh, Russian Federation.
Eduard Vladimirovich studied at the department of physics of Moscow State University. He graduated from the department of physics of Moscow State University in 1913 and joined the staff of Shanyavsky University.
In 1918 Eduard Vladimirovich returned to Moscow State University and lectured there until 1939. In 1932 he also joined the faculty of Moscow State Pedagogical Institute (now Moscow State Pedagogical University) and chaired its department of physics for 46 years. He received the doctorate at Moscow State University in 1933.
After World War II Eduard Vladimirovich engaged in physical studies of carcinogens. In 1952 Eduard Vladimirovich, Ilyina and Klimov published an article in Doklady Akademii Nauk asserting that complex organic substances that normally do not have clearly defined spectral lines do, in fact, emit or absorb them at low temperatures when mixed with specific organic solvents. Use of the solvent, forming a snow-like paraffin structure at 77 K, was a radical departure from an established spectroscopy routine. In the same year Pyotr Kapitsa provided Shpolsky his laboratory to repeat the experiment at lower temperatures.
This property became known as Shpolsky effect; Soviet authorities formally recognized it as a discovery only after Shpolsky's death. In 1961 Karl Rebane suggested that Shpolsky effect was an optical analogy to Mössbauer effect. Roman Personov, an alumnus of Shpolsky laboratory, confirmed Karl Rebane hypothesis in 1971. Later studies showed that matrix isolation fluorimetry has significant practical advantages over original Shpolsky methode.