CERN Courier – July-August 2019

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CERN COURIER JULY/AUGUST 2019 55

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OBITUARIES

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Nikhef particle physicist and

prominent member of the ATLAS

experiment at CERN, Olga Igonkina,

passed away on 19 May in Amster-

dam at the age of 45.

Olya, as she was known to most of

us, was born in 1973 in Moscow. Her

father was an engineer, her mother

a biological scientist. At age 14 she

went to a special school for children

talented in mathematics and in 1991

started her studies in physics at the

Moscow Institute for Physics and

Technology. Two years later Olya

moved to the ITEP institute to spe-

cialise in particle physics, working

at the ARGUS experiment and later

the HERA-B experiment at DESY.

Olya wrote her dissertation about

J/ψ production in HERA-B, with

Mikhail Danilov as her supervisor.

In 2002 she moved to BaBar at SLAC

as a postdoc with the University of

Oregon in the group of Jim Brau,

where she worked on searches for

lepton-flavour-violating tau decays

and became convener of the BaBar

tau working group. In 2006 she

moved to CERN to spearhead Ore-

gon’s new ATLAS group. Her work

in ATLAS concentrated on the

trigger, where she contributed to

many activities with great ideas

and enthusiasm, in particular as the

trigger-menu coordinator during

the startup of the LHC, and later on

physics with tau leptons. She began

her appointment at Nikhef in 2008

and in 2015 became a professor at

Radboud University in Nijmegen.

For her efforts on the ATLAS

trigger, Olya was given an ATLAS

outstanding achievement award in

2018. Physics-wise, her passion was

lepton flavour violation, in particu-

lar in tau decays. Intrigued by the

hints of lepton-flavour violation

in B decays reported by the LHCb

experiment and B factories, and

always on the lookout for a niche

in a large collaboration, in 2018 Olya

moved some of her efforts from tau

to B physics. She took responsibil-

ity for the B-hadron triggers with

the aim of collecting an even larger

CERNsample of B decays in ATLAS for the

final year of Run 2. She was working

on preparations for an RK measure-

ment until her very last days.

Besides being a talented scientist,

Olya was a dedicated teacher. She

supervised an impressive number of

PhD students and was very success-

ful in obtaining research grants.

She was also very active in outreach

activities, with masterclasses and

open days at Nikhef, and in com-

munity building at ATLAS. Recently

she organised the 15th International

Workshop on Tau Lepton Physics

conference in Amsterdam.

Olya was a passionate physi-

cist who was bursting with ideas.

Among several tributes from her

colleagues, Olya was described as a

future experiment leader. She had a

memorably strong work ethos, and

until the very last moment refused

to let her illness affect her work.

She was always cheerful and always

positive. Her attitude to work and

life will remain a source of inspi-

ration to many of us.

Olya leaves behind her husband,

Wouter Hulsbergen of Nikhef, and

two children.

Her colleagues and friends.

Ol g a BOr is Ov na ig On k ina 1973–2019

A talent and a love for physics

Olya was an expert in tau physics.

Dieter re n k er 1944–2019

A curious physicist with detector expertise

Dieter Renker, who made some key

contributions to the design and

construction of the CMS exper-

iment at the LHC, passed away

on 16 March after a short illness.

Dieter was born in Bavaria and

studied physics in Munich and

Berlin. He obtained his PhD from

the Ludwig Maximilian University

in Munich, based on experiments

performed at SIN, now the Paul

Scherrer Institute (PSI), in Villi-

gen, Switzerland. In 1982 he joined

SIN as a staff physicist, where he

remained until his retirement at

the end of 2009.

At SIN/PSI he participated in

many experiments, providing

excellent technical support, as

well as designing new beamlines

at the accelerator there. His tech-

nical aptitude in due course turned

to detector development, which

led to his greatest achievement.

In the early days of CMS there

were various ideas for the design

of the electromagnetic calorimeter.

Among these was the use of lead

tungstate crystals, which although

having many suitable properties

for operation at the LHC, have a

relatively small scintillation-light

yield. Dieter contributed the key

measurements which showed

that avalanche photodiodes

(APDs), with their key properties

of internal gain and insensitivity

to shower leakage, could be used

to read out the crystals. This led

to lead-tungstate crystals being

adopted by CMS for the design of

s

Renker’s pioneering measurements

led to lead-tungstate crystals being

adopted by the CMS calorimeter.

NDIP

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