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Jurgis, as he was known to all his friends and colleagues, was born in 1941 in Vilnius. The last time he saw his father was during the post-war Soviet mass deportations and repressions, and from the age of about six or seven he grew up in the family of Professor Paulius Slavėnas.

 

In 1958, he finished Vilnius A. Vienuolis School (formerly 1st Gymnasium for Boys) and from 1958 to 1963 studied at Vilnius University. In 1963, he started working at the Semiconductor Physics Institute (SPI, which at the time was still the Institute of Physics and Mathematics), where he defended his doctoral thesis in 1970 [1].

 

 

 

Jurgis’s entire professional life as a physicist revolved around the Semiconductor Optics Laboratory of the SPI. The first head of the laboratory was Prof. Algirdas Šileika. Jurgis was his PhD student and later, after completing his thesis, his right-hand man. In the mid-1960s, Šileika did a fellowship with Manuel Cardona in the U.S.A., from where he brought the idea of modulation spectroscopy to Lithuania. In those days, the modulation spectroscopy was playing the first violin in solid-state physics – it was an impetus for the band structure studies.

 

Although everyone knew that in theory the energy spectrum of crystals is very strange and complex, having the so-called band structure, the modulation spectroscopy made it possible to disclose that band structure experimentally. Jurgis, together with Šileika and Julius Kavaliauskas (Jurgis’s brother-in-arms at the Semiconductor Optics Laboratory), are pioneers of the modulation spectroscopy in Lithuania.

 

Between the 1960s and the 1980s, applying numerous variations of the modulation spectroscopy technique, the Semiconductor Optics Laboratory carried out studies of the energy spectrum of almost all binary and ternary semiconductors known at the time; those were the studies that both competed successfully and resonated with broad research conducted in parallel on both sides of the Iron Curtain. A small part of that research is reported in the monograph [2].

 

Jurgis’s energetic work in the laboratory – his studies of the energy spectrum of semiconductors, their anisotropy, and their optical activity – attracted PhD students. Alfonsas Rėza (PhD in 1976), Gintautas Ambrazevičius (1979), Saulius Marcinkevičius (1986), Daiva Senulienė (1986), and Gediminas Pukinskas (1989), among others, were Jurgis’s doctoral students.

 

In 1990, Jurgis wrote his habilitation thesis [3]. In 1992, he became the head of the Semiconductor Optics Laboratory, in 1993 started lecturing at Vilnius Gediminas Technical University, and in 1995 became a professor. In 2000, Jurgis was awarded the Officer’s Cross of the Order of the Lithuanian Grand Duke Gediminas.

 

 

 

Reviewing Jurgis’s work in the 1990s and beyond, two important areas of research should be mentioned in particular: magnetooptics of the rare-earth compounds (e.g. [4]) and high-temperature superconductors (e.g. [5, 6]). The former was the result of his close collaboration with Raimundas Dagys, and the latter was triggered by the intriguing high-temperature superconductivity (HTSC) phenomenon discovered in 1986. In the HTSC studies, spectroscopic ellipsometry – then a new method of experimental optical research – played an exceptional role. Jurgis is a founder of the spectroscopic ellipsometry in Lithuania, the technique which was later successfully developed by his disciples Alfonsas Rėza and Saulius Tumėnas.

 

Jurgis was known and respected not only by the academic community in Lithuania. Speaking of his closest colleagues abroad, mention should be made of professors Manuel Cardona (Max Planck Institute, Stuttgart), Ahti Niilisk (University of Tartu), Ola Hunderi (Norwegian Institute of Technology, Trondheim), Wolf Aßmus (Goethe-Universität, Frankfurt), and Lidia Leonyuk (Moscow State University), among others. Regrettably, only Ahti Niilisk and Wolf Aßmus can join the pro memoria to Jurgis:

 

He was one of the most remarkable persons we have ever met.

 

Others, like Jurgis, have already passed away.