Basic Research in Russia: Human Resources and Funding

This paper describes the current status and recent trends of basic research in Russia, measured in resource terms. The extensive growth in the numbers of R&D institutions, researchers and investment until the late 1970s provided the creation of an extremely large R&D base which was greater in scale than most of the industrially developed countries. It firstly concerns substantial highly-qualified human resources which made Russia famous for considerable achievements in basic research and military-oriented technologies. The transition to a market economy has a strong influence on the resources of R&D in Russia. Changes in the objectives of economic, social, and political progress reflect in transforming the institutional structure of the economy, the fast growth of the private sector, the conversion of military industries, and the gradual integration of Russia into the world economy. These processes take place in conditions of economic recession, rapid inflation, a growing deficit of the state budget, a worsening social situation, and political instability. Further progress of basic research in such a critical economic situation faces significant difficulties which should be observed in order to formulate an appropriate policy in this area

Autoionization widths by Stieltjes imaging applied to Lanczos pseudospectra

Excited states of atoms and molecules lying above the ionization threshold can decay by electron emission in a process commonly known as autoionization. The autoionization widths can be calculated conveniently using Fano formalism and discretized atomic and molecular spectra by a standard procedure referred to as Stieltjes imaging. The Stieltjes imaging procedure requires the use of the full discretized spectrum of the final states of the autoionization, making its use for poly-atomic systems described by high-quality basis sets impractical. Following our previous work on photoionization cross-sections, here we show that also in the case of autoionization widths, the full diagonalization bottleneck can be overcome by the use of Lanczos pseudospectra. We test the proposed method by calculating the well-documented autoionization widths of inner-valence-excited neon and apply the new technique to autoionizing states of hydrofluoric acid and benzene

Vibrationally Resolved Decay Width of Interatomic Coulombic Decay in HeNe

We investigate the ionization of HeNe from below the He 1s3p excitation to the He ionization threshold. We observe HeNe$^+$ ions with an enhancement by more than a factor of 60 when the He side couples resonantly to the radiation field. These ions are an experimental proof of a two-center resonant photoionization mechanism predicted by Najjari et al. [Phys. Rev. Lett. 105, 153002 (2010)]. Furthermore, our data provide electronic and vibrational state resolved decay widths of interatomic Coulombic decay (ICD) in HeNe dimers. We find that the ICD lifetime strongly increases with increasing vibrational state.Comment: 7 pages, 5 figure

Sudden drop of fractal dimension of electromagnetic emissions recorded prior to significant earthquake

The variation of fractal dimension and entropy during a damage evolution process, especially approaching critical failure, has been recently investigated. A sudden drop of fractal dimension has been proposed as a quantitative indicator of damage localization or a likely precursor of an impending catastrophic failure. In this contribution, electromagnetic emissions recorded prior to significant earthquake are analysed to investigate whether they also present such sudden fractal dimension and entropy drops as the main catastrophic event is approaching. The pre-earthquake electromagnetic time series analysis results reveal a good agreement to the theoretically expected ones indicating that the critical fracture is approaching

Operator interpretation of resonances generated by some operator matrices

We consider the analytic continuation of the transfer function for a 2x2 matrix Hamiltonian into the unphysical sheets of the energy Riemann surface. We construct a family of non-selfadjoint operators which reproduce certain parts of the transfer-function spectrum including resonances situated on the unphysical sheets neighboring the physical sheet. On this basis, completeness and basis properties for the root vectors of the transfer function (including those for the resonances) are proved.Comment: LaTeX, 15 pages, no figures; Contribution to Proceedings of the Mark Krein International Conference on Operator Theory and Applications, Odessa, August 18-22, 199