Klavko was born in the village of Ozero, in western Ukraine, in 1957.
NASU
A leading physicist is among the latest civilian casualties of the war in Ukraine, the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine (NASU) reported earlier this week.
Vasyl Petrovych Klavko was best known for his work on using high-resolution X-ray diffraction (the way a beam of x-rays scatters as it passes through a material) to find defects in very thin crystalline structures – such as the ones that make up the semiconductors in microchips, diodes, and transistors.
A semiconductor is a material that doesn’t conduct electricity as well as a really conductive material (like copper), but conducts electricity better than an insulating material (like rubber). Semiconductors are somewhere in the middle of the conductivity spectrum, hence the name. They’re usually materials that have a crystalline structure when solid, like silicon. The flat base of a microchip, which holds circuits and other components, is a semiconductor.
Klavko’s work was especially important because of the growing demand for smaller, but more powerful and complex, microchips. Manufacturers of microchips, and other small but essential electronic components, need to be able to control the physical and chemical properties of the material at a tiny scale, less than a micron. By using x-ray diffraction, Klavko figured out ways to get a very detailed look at very small, very thin layers of crystal materials.
Since 2004, Klavko headed a department dedicated to exactly that line of research, the Department of Structural Analysis of Semiconductor Materials and Systems at NASU’s V.E. Lashkaryov Institute of Semiconductor Physics. He was also deputy director of the V.E. Lashkaryov Institute itself, and he served as editor of several physics journals in Ukraine and internationally.
Klavko died on March 13 when Russian forces entered the Ukrainian city of Irpin, a suburb of the capital Kyiv, and, according to a statement from NASU which hasn’t been independently confirmed, fired on civilians in the city. It remains unclear exactly what happened. What is known is that Klavko had been helping his wife and grandchildren evacuate the besieged city. Klavko’s wife and grandchildren were out of Irpin by the time Russian forces moved in, but Klavko, for some reason, was not.
He was 65 years old.
The now-defunct Soviet Union named Klavko an “Inventor of the Soviet Union” in 1986, the same year he received his doctorate. He received the State Prize of Ukraine in the field of sciences and technology in 2007, and a number of other major awards in the years since.
“With his death, Ukrainian and world science have lost a person of significance in solid state physics,” wrote NASU.
Estimates of the number of civilians killed by Russian forces range from 400 to 800 in the 24 days since the start of the invasion.
