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Physicist dies in air crash

23 September 1998

Klaus Kinder-Geiger, 35, a leading theorist in relativistic heavy-ion physics, died tragically on 2 September aboard the Swissair New York to Geneva flight which crashed near Nova Scotia.

His Parton Cascade Model has decisively influenced our view of high-energy nuclear reactions, with important implications for future programmes at Brookhaven’s RHIC and CERN’s LHC colliders.

After his thesis on glueball decays at Frankfurt in 1989, Klaus spent postdoctoral years at Duke University and Minnesota, where he developed the Parton Cascade Model. While a Fellow in CERN’s Theory Division from 1994 96, he worked with John Ellis on hadronization theory. He joined Brookhaven’s nuclear theory group in 1996. His recent research also covered the application of the renormalization group to QCD transport theory.

His enthusiasm and vision was an inspiration to his many friends and collaborators, who mourn his untimely death.

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