WELCOME!

to the web-site of the International Ural Seminar on Radiation Damage Physics of Metals and Alloys

Our Seminar is held every two years in the Dalnaya Dacha sanatorium located near the city of Snezhinsk in the South Urals (approximately 100 km south of Ekaterinburg and north of Chelyabinsk). The Seminar is organized by the Russian Federal Nuclear Center – All-Russia Institute of Technical Physics (RFNC-VNIITF), the Institute of Metal Physics of the Urals Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences (IMP UB RAS), the Institute of Theoretical and Experimental Physics (ITEP), and the Scientific Board of Radiation Physics of Solids of the Russian Academy of Sciences (SB RPS RAS). On our page you will learn about the history of our Seminar, its subjects, and the principal lines of work.

The History of the Seminar

The decision to organize the International Ural Seminar on Radiation Damage Physics of Metals and Alloys as a traditional event of SB RPS RAS was taken in 1994 by the leadership of SB RFS RAS, IMP UB RAS (base organization of SR RFS RAS) and RFNC-VNIITF. There were two serious circumstances that necessitated such a decision:

– With the collapse of the Soviet Union, there came an end to the Bakuriani School of RPS. The School was organized by Acad. E.L. Andronikashvili and Prof. I.A. Naskidashvili (Georgia) in the 1960s and worked successfully for more than 20 years. It was necessary to keep up the creative informal traditions of the Bakuriani School so much favoured by the “radiation community” of the USSR.

– It was in that period that there arose heated discussions around the problems of defense conversion in Russia, including reorientation of developers of weapons of mass destruction and their integration into the world scientific community. The subjects of the Seminar addressed the problems of formation and evolution of radiation defects, radiation-induced structural-phase transformations, and related topics. They were willingly received by researchers of high professional qualification at a number of defense enterprises of the Urals, because they showed them an opportunity to get efficiently integrated in the “radiation community” of civilian scientists.

The First Seminar took place in February 1995, and successfully continued every two years. The upcoming Eighth Seminar will be held in February-March 2009. The first conference announcement and call for papers will be circulated in March-April 2008. If you haven’t yet visited our Seminar, but would like additional information about attending, please write to the Secretariat at RadDamPhys@imp.uran.ru (for Russian speakers) or cmelliot@illinois.edu (for English speakers).

All the best; we look forward to seeing you at our Seminar!

      The Seminar Organizing Committee