Keeping knowledge alive in wartime

For Dr Andrey Iljin, war breaking out with Russia came as a shock.

The Ukrainian physicist says the sense of confusion is what he remembers most from those early days. Then life settled into a new, very unusual, normal.

“We only knew air raids, sirens almost every day – we needed to go into shelters,” Iljin says.

Although fighting moved away from Kyiv, where Iljin lived and worked, he found it difficult to continue with his research.

“I’m an experimentalist, but it was almost impossible to work – just to think of things,” he says.

Iljin has spent the past few months based at the Research School of Physics at The Australian National University (ANU). He travelled to Australia thanks to funding from the Australian Academy of Science’s Ukraine-Australia Research Fund.

The initiative was created to enable Ukrainian scientists impacted by war to safely continue their research. It offers short-term visits to Australia and access to infrastructure capabilities, such as the National Computational Infrastructure supercomputers based at ANU.

“In a situation with uncertainty, you would go anywhere you have a possibility,” Iljin says. “So, I applied for this visiting grant for Academy of Sciences of Australia because this group here [at ANU] is quite famous, I would say one of the top in the world.”

“And also, I was very interested in Australia as a country to visit.”

Iljin’s research deals with optics – a branch of physics that studies the behaviour of light. One area of interest in this field is optical computing, or the idea of harnessing the speed of light to make computation more efficient.

To do this, physicists need to know how to manipulate light on a small scale and create new materials – known as metamaterials – that can allow for this particular use of light.

After being unable to carry out experiments in his home country, Iljin says he now has new ideas “very often” and the collaboration with his host Ilya Shadrivov and the team at ANU has been worthwhile.

“The team was working with metamaterials and I was working mainly with liquid crystals, and we tried to combine this to make controllable, tuneable metamaterials,” he explains.

“Well, it is just the beginning, so I cannot promise anything, but it’s quite interesting. My visit is coming to an end, but hopefully we will communicate and try to push things forward.”

For Iljin, who will be returning to Germany where his family is now based, being able to come up with new ideas and advance scientific knowledge is essential, especially considering the geopolitical context.

“The economy and life [in Ukraine] are now focused on things other than science. Only very necessary things related to defence are supported,” Iljin says.

“It’s not an easy time for all, not only for scientists, but science is disrupted.”

The scientist says he worries that a failure to prioritise physics research will have negative repercussions for humanity.

“Physicists develop the tools to understand nature better and to make comprehensive and clever use of nature – not expensive, overuse of anything, but clever use, smart use.

“My feeling is, if physics is abundant somewhere and then forgotten a little bit, then all other science related things degrade slowly followed by an insensible fade-out for society.

“I believe that this possibility provided me good chance to develop some things, to push science a little bit further.”