Vitaly I. Ochkur
(15.07.1929 - 18.08.2013)
Senior Researcher

Vitaly Ivanovich Ochkur was born on July 15, 1929 in Kremenchug (Ukraine). Both his parents were medical doctors, and his father was a highly ranked professor of military medicine. In 1941, with the outbreak of the war with the Nazis, the family moved to Kirov where the parents worked at the military hospital. Later in 1945 they moved to Leningrad where Vitaly's father was offered a position of Professor at the Military Medical Academy.

After graduation in 1952 from the Physics Department of the Leningrad State University, Vitaly Ivanovich studied three more years in the graduate school. His first scientific adviser was Academician Vladimir Aleksandrovich Fock who suggested Vitaly Ivanovich to join the theoretical studies of electron-atom collisions. This research was carried out by Gregory F. Drukarev who developed a formulation of the scattering problem in terms of integral equations. In his first paper (1956), V.I.Ochkur tested efficiency and accuracy of this method. It was a case study of elastic scattering of a slow electron by a hydrogen atom, taking into account the exchange between the incident and atomic electrons.

Very soon he realized that any theoretical methods in the collision theory face serious difficulties in practical calculations, which cannot be resolved without using the computational equipment. Thus he began exploring the new area of computational techniques and hardware. Vitaly Ivanovich was the author of the first program for calculations of scattering cross-sections and excitation cross-sections in collisions of electrons with the atomic hydrogen and later also with many-electron atoms. The results of these calculations, analytical as well as computational, formed a basis of his Ph.D. thesis (1958).

Over a long period of time, electron-atom collisions remained his main research area. In 1963 V.I.Ochkur published his most well-known work “About Born-Oppenheimer method in atomic collisions theory” which soon became classical. The result obtained in this work is generally recognized by the name “Born – Ochkur method”. It should be noted that in this work Vitaly Ivanovich pointed out an analogy between the expressions for the classical and quantum exchange cross sections. This observation opened a way for further improvement of the calculations and led to a series of papers on classical and semiclassical methods in electron-atom collision and excitation processes.

In his later years, Vitaly Ivanovich worked on the theory of holography. In collaboration with V.I. Rakhovsky, Yu.A. Tolmachev and V.F. Brattsev he was doing research on the methods for computer simulations of holographical images, their encoding and decoding.

Vitaly Ivanovich Ochkur was a very talented and highly educated person. He spoke English, French, German and Ukrainian, he was an expert in arts and music. An enthusiastic car driver, he was fond of travelling and became an active Internet user in his later years.

Always friendly and tactful, Vitaly Ivanovich was a very modest and nice person. He will be remembered by his friends and colleagues for his outstanding research achievements as well as high human qualities.