Florian Goebel 1972–2008
Florian Goebel, who is well known in the high-energy physics community, lost his life in an accident at work on the MAGIC-II telescope on the island of La Palma in the Canary Islands on 10 September 2008.
Born in Cologne in October 1972, Florian studied physics at the University of Heidelberg. Working in astroparticle physics on a Fulbright fellowship he later graduated from the State University of New York in Stony Brook. In 2001 he joined the ZEUS experiment at DESY in Hamburg, where he was involved in the construction and installation of the ZEUS Forward Plug Calorimeter. His doctoral thesis won the 2001 DESY prize for submitting the best thesis of the year.
In 2002, Florian joined the MAGIC project at the Max Planck Institute for Physics in Munich (MPP), contributing to the commissioning and debugging of the first MAGIC telescope. His work on the development and later upgrade of the data-acquisition system greatly improved the data quality and enhanced the sensitivity of the telescope.
Using the MAGIC telescope to observe the spectra of distant sources, Florian and his colleagues studied the extragalactic background light, which reveals information about the star-formation rates and the structure formation of the universe. He proposed and undertook monitoring of the bright nearby active galaxies to search for very fast flares in order to test the quantum gravity effect and to see the correlation between high-energy gamma rays observed by MAGIC and high-energy neutrinos observed by the AMANDA and IceCube experiments.
For the past three years, as a project manager, Florian was responsible for the construction of the MAGIC-II telescope. He scheduled the production, delivery and installation of all elements of the telescope, mirrors, electronics, camera and all necessary software. He designed and produced the camera for the new telescope together with the engineers and technicians at the MPP. Just days before the official inauguration of the telescope, a tragic accident occurred as he was finishing work on the instrument. Out of respect for Florian, the collaboration cancelled the inauguration ceremony.
Florian was an exceptionally friendly and enthusiastic collaborator and a leader with multiple interests in and beyond physics. A brilliant physicist and warm-hearted person, he will be deeply missed.
His colleagues and friends.