Helmut Faissner

Helmut Faissner (born May 5, 1928 in Kempten (Allgäu) , † August 2, 2007 in Aachen ) was a German physicist and rector of the Rheinisch-Westfälische Technische Hochschule Aachen .

Life

Helmut Faissner studied physics at the Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg . In 1952 he was there with the work The anomalous dispersion on the lines of the yellow-green bromine vapor bands to the Dr. rer. nat. PhD . He then worked as an assistant at the Max Planck Institute for Medical Research in Heidelberg and at the Physics Institute at the University of Tübingen. In 1958 he received a scholarship at the European Research Center CERN in Geneva, later he took over the management of the neutrino counter group there.

In 1963 he was appointed to the chair for experimental physics at RWTH Aachen University . There he founded the III. Physics institute with the research area elementary particle physics . During the student unrest from 1969 to 1970 he was rector at RWTH Aachen University. In 1993 he retired .

Faissner was married and had three children. He found his final resting place in the Aachen forest cemetery .

Act

With his research, among other things on the fundamental forces of nature and the smallest building blocks of matter at CERN, he has made a significant contribution to progress in elementary particle physics. He was involved in the Gargamelle collaboration at CERN , which discovered neutral currents ( Z bosons ) in 1973 . In June 1976 he organized the international Aachen neutrino conference, at which Carlo Rubbia presented the conversion of the proton accelerator SPS at CERN into a proton-antiproton collider, which led to the discovery of the W boson. Under the direction of Faissner, his institute was also the only German group involved in the UA1 collaboration at CERN, in which the W boson was detected in 1983.

Helmut Faissner has published numerous scientific papers. He has received several national and international awards, such as the Max Born Prize in 1980 , which was jointly awarded to him by the German Physical Society and the British Institute of Physics (IOP) . In 1986 he was awarded the Cross of Merit 1st Class of the Federal Republic of Germany . In 1984 he became a Fellow of the American Physical Society .

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personal data
SURNAME	Faissner, Helmut
BRIEF DESCRIPTION	German physicist
DATE OF BIRTH	May 5, 1928
PLACE OF BIRTH	Kempten
DATE OF DEATH	August 2, 2007
Place of death	Aachen