Rashba's graduation from the university fell onto the last years of
Stalin's reign darkened by extreme national
chauvinism. As a result, he had to change temporary jobs five times during the five following years. During this time he initiated, as applied to dams, theory of gravitational stresses in growing elastic bodies (non-Euclidean grows, in current terminology), and also developed theory of exciton-phonon coupling in molecular crystals. In 1954 Rashba was accepted to the Semiconductor Department of the
Institute of Physics of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine where he initially worked on the theory of transistors but earned his PhD degree in 1956 on his work on
exciton-
phonon coupling (including prediction of coexistence of free and self-trapped excitons, discovered experimentally two decades later on, based on the concept of self-trapping barrier for excitons essential for current work on Sun energy conversion). When the Institute for Semiconductors of the same Academy was established in 1960, Rashba headed there the Department for Theory of Semiconductor Devices. He earned his Doctor of Sciences degree from the
A.F. Ioffe Institute in Leningrad in 1963 for his work on
spin-orbit coupling in semiconductors and
exciton spectroscopy of molecular crystals (deducing energy spectra of excitons in pure crystals from optical spectra of mixed crystals, in collaboration with
Vladimir Broude). In collaboration with Solomon Pekar, Rashba introduced a mechanism of spin-orbit interaction in magnetic media originating from the coupling of electron spin to microscopically inhomogeneous magnetic field of magnetic background. In 1966, after the Institute of Theoretical Physics of the
Academy of Sciences of USSR (currently the
Landau Institute for Theoretical Physics) was established in
Chernogolovka (Moscow district), Rashba moved there and served as the head of the Theory of Semiconductors Division and afterwards as a principal scientist until 1997. During 1967-1991, Rashba also served as a professor of physics at the
Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology (
MIPT). In 1991 Rashba moved to the United States, where he worked as a research scholar at the
University of Utah (1992–1999),
SUNY at Buffalo (2001–2004), and
Harvard University (2004–2015). He was also associated with
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT, 2000–2004), served as an adjunct professor at
Dartmouth College (2000–2003) and as a Rutherford Professor at the
Loughborough University (2007–2010). During this period Rashba worked mostly on spintronics and physics of
nanosystems. After Rashba's severe case of
Guillain–Barré syndrome (1997) his ability to work was facilitated by his wife Erna and the family of his daughter. For about 15 years Rashba served as a member of the editorial boards of the journals
JETP Letters and
Journal of Luminescence. ==Recognitions==