Subject Grouping: Praxis

Stanley G Wojcicki, a long-time leader in experimental particle physics, died on 31 May at the age of 86. Stan made a number of seminal contributions to the field, beginning with the discovery of many short-lived particles as a graduate student at Berkeley. He quickly rose to prominence, becoming an expert on K-meson physics, where he made a series of investigations and discoveries that played an important role in understanding the structure of the Standard Model.

Stan hardly had a typical childhood. Born in Warsaw, Poland, his youth was dominated by World War II, which caused great hardships, including the separation of his family for several years, followed by a difficult life under the communist regime. Finally, his mother, brother and he managed to escape to Sweden. There, they were refugees for eight months, before they were finally able to move to the US. Stan’s father remained in Poland, where he was jailed for five years, and never received a visa to rejoin his family.

From a very young age, Stan was an exceptional student who loved and excelled at mathematics. He continued to stand out in school in his new country and gained admission to Harvard University as an undergraduate, majoring in physics. He went on to Berkeley as a graduate student in physics, which is where he and I met and became lifelong friends, colleagues and sometimes collaborators.

Upon receiving his PhD in 1962, Stan spent a year at CERN and Collège de France, Paris (1964–1965). He returned frequently to CERN, including for a period supported through a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship in 1973–1974. During that year, Stan continued his research on the excited states of hadrons made from combinations of quarks. He continued his close association with CERN, once again as a scientific associate in 1980–1981, and for shorter periods throughout his career.

Stan was appointed assistant professor in the physics department at Stanford in 1966, advanced to full professor in 1974, served as chair from 1982–1985 and stayed on the faculty until his retirement in 2015. He characteristically became interested in the newest and most exciting areas in the field, and was quick to join the design effort for the Superconducting Super Collider (SSC). He served as deputy director of the SSC central design group in Berkeley and was deeply involved in proposing and obtaining approval for the construction of the SSC in Texas. He continued to be active in many aspects of the SSC until it was cancelled by Congress in 1993, and wrote an insightful two-volume history of the project.

After the SSC disappointment, Stan characteristically bounced back to take on a new emerging area of particle physics: neutrino masses and oscillations. He proposed and led the MINOS experiment, a key element of a long-baseline neutrino experiment that sent a beam of neutrinos through a near detector at Fermilab and to a second detector, 735 km away, in a deep mine in Minnesota. MINOS was very important in providing evidence confirming the observations of atmospheric neutrino oscillations from Super-Kamiokande in Japan.

Stan received many honours, including the Pontecorvo Prize in 2011 and the APS Panofsky Prize in 2015 for his neutrino work. He met his wife, Esther, while he was a PhD student at Berkeley. They married in 1961 and had three daughters of whom he was very proud, Susan (CEO of YouTube), Janet (professor of paediatrics at UCSF Medical School) and Anne (founder and CEO of 23andMe). He will be very much missed by his many long-time friends and colleagues. 

Milos Lokajicek, a long-time employee of the division of elementary particle physics of the Institute of Physics of the Czech Academy of Sciences, passed away in June at the age of 70. Milos was involved in almost all the key experiments in which the Czech particle-physics community participated, especially in the collection and processing of experimental data.

Milos began his career in the 1980s on an experiment at the Serpukhov accelerator in the former USSR, investigating proton–antiproton and later deuteron–antideuteron collisions in the Ludmila hydrogen bubble chamber. After obtaining his PhD in 1984, while still at JINR Dubna, he was also involved in the DELPHI experiment at LEP, which played a key role in the Czech Republic’s entry into CERN in 1993. 

After returning to the Institute of Physics, he was at the origin of the participation of Czech physicists in the ATLAS experiment at the LHC, the construction of which was approved in 1994. Together with other staff of the Institute of Physics and colleagues from Charles University, he initiated the construction of the ATLAS TileCal hadron calorimeter and built a laboratory for the assembly and testing of the calorimeter submodules in the former garage of the Institute of Physics. 

Since his participation in the Ludmila and DELPHI experiments, Milos focused on data processing. Already in the mid-1990s, he had built a computer farm for data processing and modelling at the Institute of Physics, which today serves several large experiments. 

In 1997, together with colleagues from Charles University and the Czech Technical University, he initiated the group’s participation in the D0 experiment at the Tevatron, Fermilab. Participation in this experiment was important for the training of young physicists in ATLAS, the construction of which was beginning at that time. After the Tevatron was decommissioned in 2011, Milos obtained funding for the Fermilab–CZ research infrastructure in 2016 with a gradual transition to the neutrino-physics programme. He worked on the NOvA experiment and also used his experience and contacts at CERN for the future DUNE experiment.

The reach of Milos’s work extends far beyond his home institute. Within the Czech Republic, it was the coordination of the activities of Czech institutions in Fermilab and the development of data processing. He was also a long-standing member of the Committee for Cooperation of the Czech Republic with CERN. His international reputation is documented by numerous memberships in steering committees of experiments and projects, and a number of conferences he co-organised. Among the most important are ACAT 2014, CHEP2009, DØ Week 2008 and ATLAS Week 2003.

Milos’s collegiality and friendship will be missed by all of us.

The 2023 Enrico Fermi Prize of the Italian Physical Society (SIF) has been awarded to Massimo Ferrario, Lucio Rossi and Frank Zimmermann for their outstanding contributions to accelerator technologies, ranging from plasma acceleration to the realisation of ultra-high energy particle colliders. Established by SIF in 2001, the centenary of Fermi’s birth, with an award of €30,000, the prize is awarded annually to one or more members for their significant contributions to physics.

Massimo Ferrario (INFN, Frascati) is cited for his formidable contributions to high-brightness photoinjectors, free-electron-laser photon sources and plasma-acceleration techniques. Following this path, he currently leads the EuPRAXIA project, which aims to develop the first dedicated research infrastructure based on novel plasma-acceleration concepts.

Lucio Rossi (University of Milan) is recognised for his key role in R&D for large superconducting ultra-high-field magnets, in particular those for the LHC. Rossi also proposed, founded and initially directed the High-Luminosity LHC upgrade based on advanced niobium-tin magnet technology, which is due to enter operations in 2029.

Described as one of the most prolific and creative authors in accelerator physics, and author of seminal discoveries that have made it possible to realise the most modern high-luminosity, high-energy colliders, Frank Zimmermann (CERN) is cited for his fundamental and pioneering contributions to the understanding and modelling of various effects related to accelerated electron beams. His current research contributes to the HL-LHC upgrade and future colliders, such as the proposed Future Circular Collider at CERN.

All three will receive the prize during a presentation at the opening session of the 109^th National Congress of the SIF in Salerno, Italy on 11 September.

Stavros Katsanevas, who shaped the field of astroparticle physics in Europe, died on 27 November 2022. He had just become professor emeritus of Université Paris Cité and was preparing his return to the Astroparticle and Cosmology (APC) laboratory. 

Born in Athens in 1953, Stavros pursued physics at the University of Athens. In 1979 he obtained his speciality doctorate from École polytechnique in Paris. He obtained his PhD at Athens in 1985, and later became an associate professor there (1989–1996). From 1979 to 1982 he spent three years as a postdoc at Fermilab. He also worked at CERN, as a research fellow (1983–1986), research associate (1991–1992) and corresponding fellow (1996). He was then appointed professor at the University Claude Bernard Lyon 1, and in 2004 became a professor at the University Paris VII Denis Diderot (now Université Paris Cité).

From 2002 to 2012 Stavros was deputy scientific director of IN2P3, during which he steered the institute to a leading position in astroparticle physics. He was particularly active in the emerging field of multi-messenger astronomy and in instrumentation. In this context, he played a key role in the creation of the APC laboratory in Paris, of which he was director from 2014 to 2017. Until his death, he led the French–Italian European Gravitational Observatory consortium, coordinating projects related to the detection of gravitational waves with the Virgo observatory.

Stavros’s scientific career was extremely rich, as evidenced by hundreds of publications on topics related to research collaborations, experimental techniques, or the conception and design of new research infrastructures. At CERN, he distinguished himself by developing software for simulating particle interactions, which later became a standard used at LEP. He also played an essential role in federating teams in several large international collaborative projects. One example is his involvement in the OPERA experiment at Gran Sasso laboratory; another is his leading role in the development of underwater neutrino telescopes, starting with the NESTOR project, which led to ANTARES and KM3NeT. 

Over the past 15 years, Stavros played a central role in defining a global strategy in astroparticle physics. With the support of the European Commission, he created ASPERA, followed by the AstroParticle Physics European Consortium, which today gathers about 20 European countries. He was also involved in interdisciplinary research projects, mainly in the field of geosciences. He was co-director of the Laboratory of Excellence UnivEarthS from 2014 to 2018 and at the forefront of a seismometer project to be installed on the Moon.

Stavros was keen to promote science to a wide audience. Since 2015, he was a member of the jury for the Daniel and Nina Carasso Foundation, and in 2019 he organised an exhibition “The Rhythm of Space” at the museo della Grafica in Pisa. He was also coordinator of the European Horizon 2020 project REINFORCE, which intends to support more than 100,000 citizens to increase their awareness of and attitude towards science. 

Stravros was driven by an inexhaustible desire to contribute to the advancement of science by serving, stimulating and animating the community. Steeped in philosophy, literature and poetry, he was also remarkably kind and generous. His thought, his vision, his driving force, will continue to accompany us.

Theoretical physicist Stanley Deser, a co-inventor of supergravity, passed away in Pasadena, California, on 21 April. 

Stanley was born to middle-class Jewish parents in Rovno, then in Poland. In 1935 the family emigrated first to Palestine and then to France. After the Second World War broke out they fled to the US via Portugal (they were one of the families saved by Aristides de Sousa Mendes), eventually settling in Brooklyn. Stanley graduated Summa Cum Laude from Brooklyn College in 1949, and received his PhD at Harvard in 1953 under the supervision of Julian Schwinger. After postdocs at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ (1953–1955) and the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen (1955–1957), and a lectureship at Harvard University (1957–1958), he joined the faculty of the physics department at Brandeis in 1958, where he remained until he retired in 2005. After moving to Pasadena, he remained an emeritus professor at Brandeis, and continued to publish physics papers until this year (as well as his autobiography, Forks in the Road, in 2021).

Stanley was a towering figure in theoretical high-energy physics, classical gravity and quantum gravity. His work cuts through mathematical complexity with deep physical insight. His first signature work, the Arnowitt–Deser–Misner (ADM) formalism, gave a Hamiltonian initial-value formalism for general relativity. This work is the foundation of precise calculations in inflationary cosmology, needed to match cosmic microwave background observations; and in numerical relativity calculations needed to interpret the results of gravitational-wave experiments. He leaves behind a lifetime of work in theoretical physics that remains foundational, including co-inventing supergravity (contemporaneously with Ferrara, Freedman and van Nieuwenhuizen) and formulating the dynamics of the superstring with Zumino; showing that general theories with massive gravity are inconsistent; and developing topologically massive gauge theories and gravity with Jackiw and Templeton. 

Stanley was an important member of the scientific community. As Rainer Weiss, who shared the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics for the observation of gravitational waves, related, he played an important role in convincing the National Science Foundation to fund the LIGO gravitational-wave detector. He was a fellow of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences; a foreign member of the Royal Society and the Torino Academy of Sciences; he was awarded the Dannie Heineman Prize in Mathematical Physics and the Einstein Medal, along with the Guggenheim and Fulbright awards; and held honorary doctorates from Stockholm University and the Chalmers Institute of Technology.

Stanley will be remembered for his wisdom and ready wit; emails and talks in which every sentence had multiple meanings and were packed with allusions and jokes; his delight and skill in acquiring languages; a love of travel; and a deep appreciation for art and literature.

Stanley was preceded in death by his wife, the artist Elsbeth Deser (daughter of Oskar Klein), and his daughter Eva. He leaves behind three daughters – retired linguist Toni Deser; thea­tre director Abigail Deser; and atmospheric scientist (and fellow NAS member) Clara Deser – and four grandchildren, Ursula, Oscar, Louise and Simon.