In memoriam

 

Prof. Dr. Branislava Perović-Nešković died in Belgrade on February 4, 2008. She was born in Banjaluka in 1920, where she finished the primary and secondary schools. She enrolled in the Technical Faculty of the University of Belgrade in 1938. In the period of 1941-1945 she was a participant and an organizer of the People's Liberation War in Yugoslavia. After the war, she continued her education and graduated at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering of the University of Belgrade in 1951. She obtained her Ph.D. degree at the Faculty of Science of the University of Belgrade in 1964 with the thesis entitled Interaction of heavy ions of medium energies with solids.

 

Prof. Dr. B. Perović-Nešković was engaged in scientific and educational activities in the field of atomic physics in the Vinča Institute of Nuclear Sciences and at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering in Belgrade up to her retirement, in 1980. She founded Laboratory of Atomic Physics of the Vinča Institute. She was the director general of the Vinča Institute in the period of 1976-1979.

 

Research in the field of ionized gases was very intensive in Yugoslavia in the early 1960s, the major contribution to which was given just by Prof. Dr. B. Perović-Nešković. She managed designing and construction of the MS-75 electromagnetic isotope separator, which spurred research in the field of physics of atomic and electron collisions and ion optics. She participated in discovering the anisotropy in the process of cathode sputtering at higher energies. Besides, she investigated the influence of various desorption energies for various crystal orientations and contributed significantly to the field. As a result of her research, she published a large number of scientific papers.

 

Thanks to the outstanding efforts and persistence of Prof. Dr. B. Perović-Nešković, the I Yugoslav Symposium on the Physics of Ionized Gases (JS PIG) was organized in Belgrade in 1962. In this undertaking she had generous help of A. Milojević (Beograd), Z. Šternberg (Zagreb), Đ. Bošan (Niš) and A. Moljk (Ljubljana). The great success of the meeting as well as the need to study the field of ionized gases in a more organized way led to the Summer School on the Physics of Ionized Gases, held in Herceg Novi in 1964. The meeting offered the chance to a new generation of young scientists in Yugoslavia to listen for the first time to the outstanding scientists such as J. D. Craggs (UK), A. I. Cullen (UK), Yu. N. Demkov (USSR), A. von Engel (UK) J. B. Hasted (UK) and R. Herman (France). Prof. Dr. B. Perović-Nešković contributed to a great extent to the organization and success of the conference. After that, the idea to join these two meetings emerged, and the meeting entitled Yugoslav Symposium and International Summer School on the Physics of Ionized Gases (SPIG) has been held on a regular basis since 1968. This year, the 24th SPIG is taking place, and the energy, enthusiasm and high quality of scientific work of Prof. Dr. B. Perović-Nešković will remain permanently incorporated within this impressive series of significant international scientific meetings.

 

Nataša Bibić