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Buyer’s Guide

CERN Courier

Jul 19, 2011

Obituaries (page 2)

Daniel Simon 1937–2011

Simon

Daniel Simon, leader of CERN’s PS Division from 1994 to 1999, died on 2 June at the age of 74, in Nancy. CERN owes to him a great number of developments of the experimental areas around the PS and the existence of the Antiproton Decelerator (AD).

Daniel came to CERN in 1962 from the University of Nancy. He first worked in the Nuclear Physics Apparatus Division on the electrostatic separators for the secondary beams at the PS, a subject that he also chose for his thesis. Then, as a member of the PS Division, he designed a variety of beamlines, including those providing protons and antiprotons to the Initial Cooling Experiment – the decisive experiment that allowed CERN to launch the antiproton project on the basis of stochastic cooling. His contributions to the initial layout and further evolution of the experimental areas of the Low Energy Antiproton Ring (LEAR) were essential for the success of the LEAR programme. Thereafter, Daniel drove the decision and the effort for the conversion of LEAR into the Low Energy Ion Ring (LEIR) for the provision of lead ions to the LHC.

He was one of the leaders of the relocation of ISOLDE to the PS-Booster, which saved this marvellous and now flourishing facility from closure when the 600 MeV Synchrocyclotron was shut down in 1990. However, Daniel’s most significant achievement was undoubtedly the AD, which now is one of CERN’s cherished facilities despite its modest size and beam energy. It was he who, in close contact with the physics community, pushed for this project, as he could not accept the demise of low-energy antiproton physics at CERN when LEAR was to be closed and the SuperLEAR project was not accepted. This was a tough undertaking, at a time when the Large Electron–Positron collider was operating full steam and financing of the LHC was not yet assured.

Although a member of an accelerator division, Daniel had a strong affection for experimental particle physics. With a clear view of what CERN ought to do and the conviction that a broad base was indispensable, he fought valiantly and successfully for the small experiments around the PS complex and kept close contact with their users, whom he helped wherever he could. His friends and colleagues remember him as an enthusiastic physicist, an exacting and able manager, and a loyal friend.

• His colleagues and friends.

Stanislav Mikheyev 1940–2011

Mikheyev

Stanislav Mikheyev, an outstanding experimentalist in the field of neutrino and underground physics and one of the inventors of the Mikheyev–Smirnov–Wolfenstein (MSW) effect, passed away suddenly on 23 April in Moscow, after a heart attack.

Mikheyev was born in Moscow on 11 October 1940 to the family of an expert in deep mining, Paul Kail. Influenced by his uncle S Strelkov, a professor of physics, he decided to become a physicist. He entered Moscow State University in 1959 and in his final year studied nuclear physics in JINR, Dubna, where he met and was inspired by Bruno Pontecorvo.

In 1965 he began his postgraduate studies in the Lebedev Physical Institute under Aleksandr Chudakov, whose team of young scientists, including Mikheyev, developed a prototype scintillator neutrino detector. Soon, Mikheyev became a leader of the neutrino experiments and together with V Bakatanov and A Voevodsky developed a time-of-flight method to determine the direction of the muon. This method was the basis of the Baksan Underground Scintillator Telescope, to which Mikheyev made substantial contributions.

Mikheyev joined the newly created Institute for Nuclear Research (INR) in Moscow in 1970. At the suggestion of Pontecorvo his PhD thesis, defended in 1983, was promoted to a thesis for the higher degree of doctor of science because of its fundamental importance. The main results included the first measurements of the zenith-angle distribution of upward-going muons, searches for oscillations of atmospheric neutrinos, the first bound on oscillation parameters, the tightest upper limit on the diffuse flux of cosmic neutrinos, and resolution of the problem of horizontal events. These pioneering results substantially determined Mikheyev’s further work and, to a large extent, the developments of the field.

In 1984 Mikheyev realized the importance of Wolfenstein’s paper on neutrino oscillations for the analysis of atmospheric neutrino data. Thus began the collaboration with Alexei Smirnov, which led to the "invention" of the MSW effect and the discovery of two different phenomena in neutrino propagation in matter: resonance enhancement of neutrino oscillations and adiabatic flavour-conversion. The latter was proposed as an explanation of the deficit of solar neutrinos and 20 years later the MSW large-mixing-angle solution was established as the solution to the solar neutrino problem. Various applications of the MSW effect, in particular to supernova neutrinos, were also developed in 1984–1987.

During the same period Mikheyev created and led the experimental group that made further steps in understanding neutrino and muon interactions, performed searches for cosmic neutrinos from local sources, as well as neutrinos from the annihilation of dark-matter particles accumulated in the Sun and the Earth.

In 1991 Mikheyev joined the MACRO experiment in the Gran Sasso underground laboratory, where his expertise made him a principal member of the collaboration. He returned to Moscow in 1999 and since then was involved in experiments in Russia and elsewhere. As well as being the scientific leader of the Baksan Telescope, he participated in the K2K experiment in Japan, which observed oscillations of accelerator neutrinos for the first time. He also became one of the principal investigators in experiments at the Baikal Deep Underwater Neutrino Telescope NT200 and NT200+ and its extension to the gigatonne-scale.

Mikheyev was a versatile researcher with a deep understanding of theory and a remarkable ability to solve sophisticated computational problems with his own creative computer programs. With his wisdom and human friendliness he was a scientific guide and source of inspiration for many young researchers. In 2006, together with Smirnov and Wolfenstein, he was awarded the Bruno Pontecorvo Prize, and in 2008 shared with Smirnov the M Markov Prize and the J J Sakurai Prize for Theoretical Particle Physics.

Mikheyev will be remembered by his friends and colleagues for his quiet character, his modest personality, his precise style of communication with others, his impressive speed of understanding things and his deep physics intuition. His memory and lessons will remain with us.

• G Domogatsky, V Gavrin, P Lipari, V Matveev, A Smirnov, O Suvorova and colleagues, INR, Moscow.

Page 1: Obituaries

Page 2: Obituaries (page 2)

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