Vera Yurasova

Vera Yurasova (4 August 1928 - 11 January 2023) was a Russian physicist who contributed to the study of the interactions between ion beams and solid surfaces, both in their experimental characteristics and their physical mechanisms.

Vera Yurasova was born in Moscow on 4 August 1928.

Her father, Evgeniy Yurasov, was the Head of the Department of Radio Communication in Aviation in the Zhukovsky Air Force Engineering Academy.

Her husband, Anatoliy Gorshkov (1928–1997), was also a physicist and a Doctor of Science.

Vera Yurasova studied at the Physics Faculty of Moscow State University from 1946 to 1951.

She did her diploma project – "Movement and focusing of particles in a trakhotron" – in the Institute of Automatic Telemechanics of Academy of Science of the USSR, under the supervision of Professor Dmitri Zyornov.

After finishing her studies in 1951, she started work at Moscow University, at the department of electron optics, in the Faculty of Physics.

In 1958, she completed her PhD on "Processes under cathodic sputtering of metal mono- and poly-crystals", under supervision of Professor Grigoriy Spivak.

See, for example, N.V. Pleshivdtsev "Cathodic Sputtering" (Atomizdat 1963) and R. Behrisch "Sputtering by Particle Bombardment,II" (Springer–Verlag, Berlin, Heidelberg, New York, 1983).

She played an active role on a number of scientific councils in the Academy of Science and the Ministry of Higher Education, and in the organising and programme committees of many international conferences.

In 1975, she became a Doctor of Science for her work on "Emission of atomic particles under ion bombardment of single crystals".

In the early days of her research, she regularly discussed her scientific results with key scientists, who were at the time working at the Physics Faculty of Moscow University: Aleksey Shubnikov, Sergey Vekshinskiy, Lev Artsimovich.

Along with Spivak, she counted these as her teachers.

Later, she had close scientific links with the theorist Oleg Firsov, with whom she also worked in the Russian Academy of Sciences Council for Plasma Physics.

Vera Yurasova was one of the founders of the scientific school of research on the interactions of atomic particles with solids, and her work was well known both in Russia and abroad.

Key areas of her scientific research included electronics, radiation physics of solids, diagnostics of surfaces with ion beams, and computer simulation of ion interactions with surfaces.

Vera taught at Moscow University for many years.

Here, she developed and taught courses on "Electron-optic equipment", "Interaction of ions with the surface".

She headed the Soviet (and later Russian) seminar on fundamental and applied problems in the interaction of ions with surfaces, which was a special seminar for PhD students studying sputtering and ion emissions.

She supervised 30 successful PhD students, eight of whom went on to become Doctors of Science.

Among the highlights of her work, Vera

Her scientific work was highly valued in scientific papers and books.

She was formerly a member of the International Bohmische Physical Society (from 1992), and the International Union for Vacuum Science, Technique and Applications — IUVSTA (from 1992), and a member of the editorial board of the international journal “Vacuum” (Elsevier).

Her hobbies included music, painting and photography.

Author of over 450 scientific works.

These include: