Yuriy Zaitsev celebrates his 70th birthday
Yuriy Zaitsev from the Institute of Theoretical and Experimental Physics (ITEP), Moscow, celebrates his 70th birthday on 5 December. He now looks forward to having spent 50 years at ITEP, where he is a head of the laboratory of heavy quarks and leptons. In honour of his birthday, ITEP is hosting an international colloquium on the most interesting aspects of modern high-energy physics on 7–8 December.
In the 1960s Zaitsev participated in the pioneering measurements of pion–pion interactions at low momentum-transfer at the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research and at ITEP. He then took part in experiments on high-energy particle interactions with nuclei at ITEP and Fermilab during the 1970s.
In 1979 Zaitsev joined the ARGUS collaboration at DESY as a group leader on the design, construction and operation of the muon detector. In 1997 he received the W K H Panofsky Prize in Experimental Particle Physics of the American Physical Society, together with Henning Schroeder from DESY, for "their leading role in the first demonstration of mixing in the B0–Bbar0 system". For the past decade he has coordinated the construction and operation of the muon detector in the HERA B experiment at DESY, and the construction of the precision muon spectrometer for the OPERA detector in the Gran Sasso underground laboratory.
During the 1990s Zaitsev lectured at the Moscow Engineering Physics Institute and at the High Energy Physics department of the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, while also chairing the department in 1997/98. Many young and already mature scientists have received care, attention and advice under his leadership. Zaitsev also applied his professional approach in sport, helping him to become handball champion of the USSR in 1966. At 70 he still competes at the students' football friendlies.