Vera Yurasova - Life

Life

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. Their daughter is Dr Tanya Yurasova.

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. 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 work, 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 counts these as her teachers. Later, she had particularly 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. She is well known both in Russia and abroad. Key areas of her scientific research have been electronics, radiation physics of solids, diagnostics of surfaces with ion beams, and computer simulation of ion interactions with surfaces.