In 1930, she moved to the newly established Kharkiv Institute of Physics and Technology for working with Obreimov on low-temperature spectroscopy of molecular crystals, a field pioneered by him, in the first in the USSR cryogenic laboratory created by Lev Shubnikov.
In this way Obreimov and Prykhotko investigated a wide class of inorganic and organic molecular crystals and detected optically low-temperature transitions between their different phases.
During World War II, Prykhotko worked in the city of Ufa where a number of Institutions of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences was evacuated.
Since 1944 Prykhotko worked in Kyiv, in the Institute of Physics, where here husband, a prominent Soviet nuclear physicist Aleksandr Leipunskii, was appointed as a Director.
During the following years Prykhotko and her collaborators investigated spectra of a number of crystals, and her personal favorite has been crystalline oxygen where electronic excitations combine with magnetic ones.