Zdeněk Šroubek, MSc., DrSc., was a prominent scientific figure of our Institute as well as an esteemed member of the academic community. He passed away on Thursday, 2 October, just short of his 93rd birthday.
Šroubek’s connection with our Institute dates back to 1956, when he joined the then Institute of Radio Engineering and Electronics of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences (ČSAV) as a postgraduate research fellow. He devoted his life to studying a wide range of physical phenomena and played a key role in establishing what is today the Department of Nanomaterials Preparation and Characterization research team at ÚFE.
In the final years of his life, he worked as an Emeritus Research Scientist of the Czech Academy of Sciences.
Looking back at Zdeněk Šroubek
On Thursday 2th October died, at the age of 93, the emeritus scientist of the Czech Academy of Sciences and the emeritus member of the Learned Society of the Czech Republic, Ing. Zdeněk Šroubek, DrSc.
Zdeněk was born on October 9th in Prague, where he graduated at the secondary school in 1953 and continued his study at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering of the Czech Technical University in Prague. From the very beginning he inclined more to physics. During his studies he found a part-time job at the Research Institute for Electroengineering Physics at the Charles square and he scarcely attended lectures at the University. In particular, he was interested in problems of quantum physics that he studied with enthusiasm and discussed with the fellow student Evžen Šimánek.
He graduated from the University in 1956 and joined the PhD course in the Institute of Radio Engineering and Electronics, where he continued in his individual studies of physics. His thesis, dealing with the influence of NH3 molecules quadrupole splitting on the stability of ammonia maser, defended in 1961. He considered the disertation as an episode on his way to fundamental research in physics.
He focused on Electron Paramagnetic Resonance (EPR) and in particular on the development of highly sensitive EPR spectrometer. Thanks to his effort and the group of young coworkers (Evžen Šimánek, Karel Žďánský, František Kubec), it became soon possible to perform high-quality studies of spin impurities in ionic crystals at liquid helium temperature and the EPR laboratory in IREE soon became a globally-recognised within the EPR field. Namely, the results obtained on ferroelectric crystals SrTiO3 аnd ВаТiOЗ, were acknowledged by Prof. K. A. Muller, who later published, on these crystals with perovskite structure, his famous observation of high-termperature superconductivity.
Together with Evžen Šimánek, from the Institute of Physis, they pursued the theory of covalence bonding of impurity atoms in ionic crystals. Their common publications were highly recognized by Prof. R. Orbach (University of California, Los Angeles), who both invited, sequentially, for a long-stay visit to UCLA. Zdeněk with his family left for California in 1966. At UCLA he was able to publish the first observation of electron nuclear double resonance (ENDOR) under hydrostatic pressure and the first observation of EPR on rare-earths in metals. Later his interest was oriented towards electron tunneling through metal-semiconductor and metal-insulator-semiconductor barriers, and on the investigation of solid state surfaces.
Zdeněk returned to IREE in the autumn 1971. It took place during normalization and for 10 years he could not effectively appraise obtained international recognition and numerous invitations to go abroad. Zdeněk in 1974 thanks to a good luck arranged the purchase of the ultra-high vacuum system Balzers, with the argon ion gun and quadrupole mass spectrometer as a basis of a new Secondary Ion Mass Spectroscopy (SIMS) laboratory. It enabled him to study the ionization processes during sputtering from solids both experimentally and theoretically.
On the base of published results, Zdeněk was invited, in 1981, by Prof. H. Oechsner to visit the TU Clausthal-Zellerfeld for six months (and was allowed to accept it). Following that stay he could also accept invitations to international conferences on the physics of solid state surfaces. Since 1985 he has been closely cooperating with Prof. G. Falcone (University of Calabria) on theoretical investigation of interactions between low-energy ions and electrons on solid state surfaces.
After 1989 he repeatedly visited cooperating laboratories in Italy (Prof. G. Falcone, University of Calabria, Arcavacata Di Rende), Germany (Prof. H. Oechsner, University Kaiserslautern), Austria (Prof. F. Aumayr,TU Wienna) and the United States (Prof. J. A. Yarmoff, University of California, Riverside).
When the Learned Society of the Czech Republic was established in 1994, Zdeněk became its founding member as a recognition of his outstanding results.
He inspired us what is really important in human life and how to behave during hardship.
There is no doubt that Zdeněk belongs to the most gifted physicists of recent period. Besides, he was also kind, social, friendly and all the time a young person. Imagine you met in the mountains, 25 years ago, a nice guy with his four sons looking for an eagle or other bird of prey – he could have been very likely Zdeněk.
Jiří Zavadil and Vladimír Kuzmiak
With the use of the article Karel Žďánský et al.: Československý časopis pro fyziku, 42, 5-6, 1992 and the farewell words given by Jiri Zavadil, on behalf of the Institute, at the funeral service at sv. Terezie on Kobyliské náměstí.