[Moller] Piotr Decowski Symposium

[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’t 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 “nice” 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
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