[Halla_parity] Piotr Decowski Symposium

[Robert Michaels]

Sent on behalf of Krishna Kumar

Dear Colleagues:
Many of you know this news already: Piotr Decowski, our longtime 
HAPPEX/PREX/MOLLER collaborator from Smith College, passed
away in a visit to Poland in May of this year.

I realize now (probably because I have been in denial and in shock for the 
past few months about this) that I never sent
the news to our parity mailing list. I apologize for the multiple emails 
now; I am sending this to both the halla_parity
and moller mailing lists.

On this Saturday November 1, there is a memorial symposium in his honor at 
Smith College, where I will give an
undergraduate-level talk about PREX. Another talk will be given by his son 
Patrick, who is a nuclear/particle physicist
working on T2K and double-beta decay in Amsterdam. In my talk, I plan to 
show the following slide (attached below); I
luckily have these pictures from PREX commissioning. Also, check out the 
symposium poster at the following link:

http://www.smith.edu/physics/

In brief, Piotr retired three years ago, but continued to live in 
Northampton, MA and was an adjunct faculty member at
UMass, Amherst and was working with us on PREX/MOLLER detector R&D. Piotr 
was totally fine until last October. In fact, he
participated in the Mainz detector tests on his way back from his annual 4 
month summer break in Poland.

On his return from Mainz in mid-October, he had a checkup due to sudden 
trouble with eyesight. A few weeks later, we heard
the shocking news that he was seriously ill and immediately was sent into 
various kinds of experimental therapy. I visited
him every few weeks in Northampton over the next few months for an hour at 
a time. He loved getting distracted from his
daily travails with medicine and hearing about what was going on with the 
parity program. Needless to say, these were
difficult visits as I saw the situation gradually worsen. But you 
couldn~Rt tell from his demeanor and curiosity, which
never changed.

My last visit to his home was in late April. The end came in mid-May in 
somewhat ~Snice~T circumstances. He and his Dutch
wife Ineke were invited by the President of Poland (a personal friend of 
his) to bestow Polish citizenship on his wife. He
passed away during that trip, surrounded by his close family and friends.

In preparing this talk for Saturday, I realize now how much I will miss 
him and it will hit me again I am sure when we are
installing detectors as anticipated in Fall 2016.

KK