In Memoriam: Pavel Stavina (1967 - 2010)

12 May 2010

It is with great sorrow that we inform you of the sudden death of our colleague Pavel Stavina (1967-2010). Pavel passed away on April 22 following a tragic accident that happened on April 18.

Pavel was an optimistic young man and enthusiastic physicist. He finished his undergraduate study at Comenius University of Bratislava and after one year of military service, he started his PhD study at the same university in the Department of Nuclear Physics, FMPI, which he completed in 1996.

He got his first experience with ATLAS during his PhD studies but his full engagement only began in 1997 when he got involved with LAr and Tile Calorimeter activities.

Pavel accomplished a lot during the Hadronic End-Cap (HEC) test module period. That’s when he took part in the test beam data analysis especially in the analysis of various types of cluster algorithms. He also tested the HEC electronics and its implementation within the electronics framework of the whole LAr calorimeter. Working in close collaboration with colleagues from MPI Munich, Pavel made very important contributions to the development and implementation of the local hadronic calibration in LAr.

In the Tile Calorimeter, he took part in the test beam experiments and with his student, they reconstructed the Tile Calorimeter module response to muons. He took an active part in the module calibration where he devoted a lot of energy to the data quality control. There he developed many software tools that made the data quality control process much easier. In addition to ordinary shifts, he also acted as Tile Calorimeter DQ shift leader.

Pavel was active in the Top Quark properties group, where he took part in the top quark charge studies and participated in the development of the weighting procedure for the b-jet charge calculation.

We appreciated Pavel not only for his great knowledge as a software specialist, but also for his organizational skills, his ability to take responsible decisions and for his readiness to help at any time. We will miss him a lot and it will be hard for us to fill the void created by his passing.
 

Dusan Bruncko, ATLAS Kosice group


Stanislav Tokar, ATLAS Bratislava group