Zdzisław Szymański (1926-1999)

Zdzisław Szymański, an outstanding nuclear physicists, died suddenly of a heart attack on Sunday, September 5, 1999, in Krzyże while attending the Masurian Summer School of Physics. In 1956-1978 and 1981-1996, he was employed in our Institute. Lately, he was professor emeritus at the Physics Department of Warsaw University.

Zdzisław Szymański was born in 1926 in Czarne near Włocławek. In 1950 he received his master degree in engineering at the Łódź Technical University, and in 1953 his master degree in physics at the Warsaw University.

For a short time he was employed in the Physics Institute of the Polish Academy of Sciences, where he got his PhD degree in physics. In his thesis, he considered some flow problems in rarefied gases, and at the time he was a bit unhappy with the remoteness of his thesis from contemporary physics. He did not realize that after a few decades certain properties of rarefied gases would find application in explaining the dissipation effects in atomic nuclei.

In 1956 Zdzisław Szymański started working in the Department of the Nuclear Theory of the newly established Institute of Nuclear Research. Simultaneously he was employed in the Institute of Theoretical Physics of Warsaw University, where in 1961 he got his doctor of science degree (habilitation).

In 1958 Zdzisław Szymański went to Copenhagen for a one year visit at the Niels Bohr Institute. This visit turned out to have a decisive influence on his whole scientific life. It was a great period of the Institute in Copenhagen, in which the future Nobel laureates Aage Bohr and Ben Mottelson worked on the collective model and on the role of nucleon pairing in nuclear structure. At the same time they worked on their book in which they wanted to summarize the whole of nuclear physics as it was pursued in Copenhagen. The adherents of the Copenhagen approach to nuclear physics called this book "the bible". Zdzisław Szymański yielded completely to the influence of Copenhagen and became its absolute adherent. Eventually two volumes of "the bible" appeared and Zdzisław Szymański organized and edited their Polish translation.

In his fruitful scientific activity, he was faithful to the Copenhagen approach, i.e., to the phenomenological description of atomic nuclei. In describing this activity I shall restrict myself to a few chosen results.

His first and at once very important achievement in the collective model was his pioneering paper with the Argentinean physicist Daniel Bes, in which the ground state deformation of the rare earth nuclei was calculated, with the effect of nucleon pairing taken into account.

At the end of the sixties, Zdzisław Szymański and Sven Gosta Nilsson, together with their collaborators in Warsaw and Lund investigated the properties of the hypothetical superheavy nuclei. In particular, they discussed the existence of an "island of stability" of nuclei around magic numbers of 114 protons and 184 neutrons. This activated the experimental research and led lately to the production in accelerators of superheavy elements with proton numbers up to Z=112, and also with Z=114 and Z=118.

While staying in Sweden and Denmark during the academic year 1970/71, Zdzisław Szymański, together with the Swedish physicist Joachim Krumlinde suggested that the so called "backbanding" effect in rotating nuclei is due to the phase transition of nuclear matter from the superconducting to the normal state.

Progress in heavy ion scattering experiments took place in the seventies and eighties. Fast rotating nuclei may emerge in such scattering, with spins of the order of one hundred Planck units. With his usual enthusiasm, Zdzisław Szymański started investigating these high spin nuclear states by properly modifying methods he had applied successfully before for states around the ground states. Among his results was his and his collaborators calculation of the superdeformation of fast rotating nuclei. This calculation appeared to be the main hint in the experimental search for such superdeformed states, which led to their discovery in 1986. In the problem of fast rotating nuclei, Zdzisław Szymański became an authority. In 1983 he published the highly appreciated monograph Fast nuclear rotation.

His professional career proceeded smoothly: assistant professor in 1969, member of the Polish Academy of Sciences in 1973, full professor in 1977. In 1983 he obtained an honoris causa PhD degree at Lund University.

Equally important as his research work was his teaching and other physics related duties. Close contacts with Aage Bohr and Ben Mottelson enabled him to transmit to Poland the up to date research pursued in Copenhagen. He taught the phenomenological theory of nuclear structure to both the theoreticians and experimentalists in Poland, especially in Warsaw. His successes in teaching were connected with his great talent and enthusiasm. He created around him a whole group of physicists active in nuclear structure research. He supervised dozen or so PhD students. The existence of a strong nuclear structure group in Lublin may be traced back to his activity. He should be credited for the activity of the Lund-Warsaw collaboration. In the late seventies he was the Chairman of the Scientific Council of the Institute for Nuclear Research. In 1978 he took a full time job at the Institute of Theoretical Physics at Warsaw University and organized there the Chair of the Nuclear Structure Theory. His retirement in 1996 did not stop his research activity.

A Copenhagen physicist once remarked that Zdzisław Szymański was always happy when arriving in Copenhagen. There was still another place where he certainly felt happy: this was the Masurian Lakes School of Physics to whose success he contributed so much. And it is a solace in the tragedy of his death that it happened in the place where he was always happy.

There was something very special in Zdzisław's personality. How else to explain the tears of so many of the attendants of his funeral.