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

Ultrafast interatomic electronic decay in multiply excited clusters

An ultrafast mechanism belonging to the family of interatomic Coulombic decay (ICD) phenomena is proposed. When two excited species are present, an ultrafast energy transfer can take place bringing one of them to its ground state and ionizing the other one. It is shown that if large homoatomic clusters are exposed to an ultrashort and intense laser pulse whose photon energy is in resonance with an excitation transition of the cluster constituents, the large majority of ions will be produced by this ICD mechanism rather than by two-photon ionization. A related collective-ICD process that is operative in heteroatomic systems is also discussed.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figure

Interatomic Coulombic electron capture from first principles

Interatomic Coulombic electron capture (ICEC) is an environment-assisted process in which a free electron can efficiently attach to an ion, atom or molecule by transferring the excess energy to a neighboring species. Absolute cross sections are necessary to evaluate the relative importance of this process. In this work, we employ the R-matrix method to compute ab initio these cross sections for a singly charged neon ion embedded in small helium clusters. Our results show that the ICEC cross sections are several orders of magnitude higher than anticipated and dominate other competing processes. Electron energy loss spectra on an absolute scale are provided for the Ne+@He20 cluster. Such spectra exhibit an unambiguous signature of the ICEC process. The finding is expected to stimulate experimental observations

Russian Applied Research and Development: Its Problems and its Promise

This Research Report discusses the changing nature of research and development (R&D) in Russia. In the decades following World War II, the USSR was one of the two great powers in R&D; the other was the USA. After the breakup of the Soviet Union, the R&D sector went into a precipitous decline that continued until at least 1995. The collection of papers in this report addresses what went wrong. A number of broad issues are covered, such as whether the decline of the R&D sector from 1991 to 1995 was too steep or too modest for the welfare of the Russian economy; how the structure and organization of Russian-applied R&D should be developed over the long term; and what role government policy should play in Russian-applied R&D. Chapters in the report were written by Russian senior officials and by scholars of R&D policy from outside Russia