In Memoriam: Alexei Norairovich Sissakian (1944 - 2010)

12 May 2010

The sudden passing away of Academician Alexei Norairovich Sissakian on 1st May 2010 has left ATLAS in a deep shock and great sadness. Words are missing to express our feelings about this loss of a scientific leader in our field, a keen promoter of international cooperation, a dear colleague of the Collaboration, and a close friend for many of us over the past two decades.

Alexei Sissakian was a member of ATLAS since the very beginning, working mainly with the Tile Calorimeter group. In spite of his heavy director dutiesat the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research (JINR) Dubna, we were happy to feel clearly in ATLAS that Alexei remained very committed to our experiment. He mentored all of the many extraordinary contributions of the JINR Dubna team to ATLAS, covering the construction of several detector parts and other activities. The scientific and technical achievements of the team to ATLAS are fundamental, with an impressive span covering from the heavy construction and installation of components to the operation and exploitation of the detector. The ATLAS Collaboration is very grateful to Alexei who constantly encouraged the team, and made all this possible through his wise management of the Joint Institute.

Alexei remained an active physicist in our experiment also during his years as JINR Director. With his background and worldwide reputation in theoretical and mathematical physics, he was particularly keen to see rare events with very high multiplicities at the LHC, as they could occur in some of the models developed by him and his collaborators.

We have enjoyed at numerous occasions the generosity and friendship of Alexei. For us he was not only a great leader of JINR, but also a very human colleague caring for science. His warm personality and his sharp scientific view will remain forever with us.

On behalf of the ATLAS Collaboration, and on behalf of all his colleagues and friends, we present our sincere condolences and our deep sympathy to his family and to his close friends and colleagues at Dubna.

An obituary with Alexei’s scientific milestones is available here.

Alexei Sissakian in the centre with Tile Calorimeter colleagues during a birthday party for Julian Budagov (holding a bag in his hands) at the module integration hall at CERN in July 2002.

ATLAS friends and colleagues