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Yuri Ralchenko (Fed)

Group Leader

Dr. Yuri Ralchenko is the Leader of the Atomic Spectroscopy Group at NIST. His research is focused on spectroscopy of highly-charged ions, analysis of various atomic processes in plasmas with emphasis on accurate modeling of plasma population kinetics, development of Internet atomic databases, and other aspects of plasma and atomic spectroscopy. This work includes collisional-radiative modeling of various plasmas (including non-Maxwellian and transient ones), production and assessment of accurate atomic data (energies, oscillator strengths, collisional cross sections, etc.), and development of methods and standards for uncertainty quantification and dissemination of scientific data.

Dr. Ralchenko is an Editorial Board member of several scientific journals, has authored over 140 scientific publications, and has been a speaker at numerous national and international conferences. He also is a frequent consultant at the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and a co-director of a series of Schools on atomic and plasma spectroscopy organized jointly by IAEA and the International Centre for Theoretical Physics in Trieste, Italy.

Awards

2009: Fellow of the American Physical Society for "significant contributions to the relativistic theory of highly-charged ions and collisional-radiative modeling, and through creation of online codes and databases for the atomic physics community"

2015: NIST Judson C. French Award for "establishing the world's premier resource for atomic reference data, relied upon for everything from nuclear forensics to Hubble Space Telescope data analysis"

2022: NIST PML Excellence in Cooperation, Collaboration, and Teamwork Award for "for development and deployment of a unique wide-band high-resolution microcalorimeter for precise x-ray spectroscopy of highly-charged ions"

Selected Publications

Development of NIST Atomic Databases and OnlineTools

Author(s)
Yuri Ralchenko, Alexander Kramida
Over the last 25 years, the atomic standard reference databases and online tools developed at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) provide

Publications

Benford's law in atomic spectra and opacity databases

Author(s)
Yuri Ralchenko, Jean-Christophe Pain
The intriguing law of anomalous numbers, also named Benford's law, states that the significant digits of data follow a logarithmic distribution favoring the

Atomic and Molecular Databases Open Science for a sustainable world

Author(s)
Yuri Ralchenko, Marie-Lise Dubernet, Bruce Berriman, Paul Barklem, K Choi, Adam Foster, Iouli Gordon, Christian Hill, J Kim, DH Kwon, Harold Linnartz, Farid Salama, Hanna Shmagun, P Schilke, D Seo, J Shim, S Shin, Mi-Yong Song, Jonathan Tennyson, Charlotte VASTEL
The building of online atomic and molecular databases for astrophysics and for other research fields started with the beginning of the internet. These databases

The NIST Plan for Providing Public Access to Results of Federally Funded Research

Author(s)
Katherine E. Sharpless, Regina L. Avila, Ronald F. Boisvert, A Kirk Dohne, James Fowler, Rachel B. Glenn, Gretchen Greene, Robert Hanisch, Andrea Medina-Smith, Alan Munter, Julie Petrousky, Yuri Ralchenko, Carolyn D. Rowland, James A. St Pierre, Adam Wunderlich, Jon Zhang
In 2013 White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) issued a memo, "Increasing Access to the Results of Federally Funded Scientific Research." In
Created March 16, 2019, Updated December 8, 2022