Alexandru Adalbert "Alex" Marin (June 25, 1945 – November 14, 2005) was an American experimental particle physicist, a professor of physics at

MIT The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Established in 1861, MIT has played a significant role in the development of many areas of modern technology and sc ...

Boston University Boston University (BU) is a Private university, private research university in Boston, Massachusetts, United States. BU was founded in 1839 by a group of Boston Methodism, Methodists with its original campus in Newbury (town), Vermont, Newbur ...

and

Harvard University Harvard University is a Private university, private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Founded in 1636 and named for its first benefactor, the History of the Puritans in North America, Puritan clergyma ...

, and a researcher at

CERN The European Organization for Nuclear Research, known as CERN (; ; ), is an intergovernmental organization that operates the largest particle physics laboratory in the world. Established in 1954, it is based in Meyrin, western suburb of Gene ...

and

JINR The Joint Institute for Nuclear Research (JINR, ), in Dubna, Moscow Oblast (110 km north of Moscow), Russia, is an international research center for nuclear sciences, with 5,500 staff members including 1,200 researchers holding over 1,000 ...

. Marin was born in France and arrived in

Romania Romania is a country located at the crossroads of Central Europe, Central, Eastern Europe, Eastern and Southeast Europe. It borders Ukraine to the north and east, Hungary to the west, Serbia to the southwest, Bulgaria to the south, Moldova to ...

at 3 months, with his father Gaston Marin, who was Jewish. He received his Ph.D. in physics from the Central Institute for Physics in

Bucharest Bucharest ( , ; ) is the capital and largest city of Romania. The metropolis stands on the River Dâmbovița (river), Dâmbovița in south-eastern Romania. Its population is officially estimated at 1.76 million residents within a greater Buc ...

in 1977. Before moving to the United States in 1983, he worked on high energy physics and astrophysics experiments in Romania, the

Soviet Union The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR), commonly known as the Soviet Union, was a List of former transcontinental countries#Since 1700, transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 until Dissolution of the Soviet ...

and CERN. He was Principal Investigator for experiments carried out at CERN and at

Dubna Dubna ( rus, Дубна́, p=dʊbˈna) is a town in Moscow Oblast, Russia. It has a status of '' naukograd'' (i.e. town of science), being home to the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research, an international nuclear physics research center and o ...

from 1974 to 1979, and from 1974 to 1983 was Principal Investigator for the Transition Radiation Experiment on the

Intercosmos Interkosmos () was a Soviet space program, designed to help the Soviet Union's allies with crewed and uncrewed space missions. The program was formed in April 1967 in Moscow. All members of the program from USSR were given the Hero of the Sov ...

17 satellite, and the ASTRO1 and ASTRO2 experiments on the Romanian Astronaut flight. After moving to the United States, Marin played leading roles in several large international experiments. He designed and built a laser calibration system for MACRO, a search for magnetic monopoles and other exotic hypothetical particles. He worked on the PBAR and EXAM

anti-matter In modern physics, antimatter is defined as matter composed of the antiparticles (or "partners") of the corresponding particles in "ordinary" matter, and can be thought of as matter with reversed charge and parity, or going backward in time ...

balloon experiments, which contributed to the design of the AMS magnetic spectrometer that was later flown on the

Space Shuttle The Space Shuttle is a retired, partially reusable launch system, reusable low Earth orbital spacecraft system operated from 1981 to 2011 by the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) as part of the Space Shuttle program. ...

. For

LIGO The Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) is a large-scale physics experiment and observatory designed to detect cosmic gravitational waves and to develop gravitational-wave observations as an astronomical tool. Prior to LIG ...

, the sensitive

gravity wave In fluid dynamics, gravity waves are waves in a fluid medium or at the interface between two media when the force of gravity or buoyancy tries to restore equilibrium. An example of such an interface is that between the atmosphere and the oc ...

experiment, Marin designed and built

environmental monitoring Environmental monitoring is the processes and activities that are done to characterize and describe the state of the environment. It is used in the preparation of environmental impact assessments, and in many circumstances in which human activit ...

systems. At CERN, Marin designed and built the radiation monitor for the silicon tracker of the L3 experiment on LEP. In 1991, he proposed and developed a muon system concept for the

Superconducting Super Collider The Superconducting Super Collider (SSC), nicknamed Desertron, was a particle accelerator complex under construction from 1991 to 1993 near Waxahachie, Texas, United States. Its planned ring circumference was with an energy of 20 TeV per proto ...

that was virtually identical to the one later chosen for the

ATLAS experiment ATLAS is the largest general-purpose particle detector experiment at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), a particle accelerator at CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research) in Switzerland. The experiment is designed to take advantage of ...

. Marin was a long-term member of the ATLAS Muon Collaboration and helped construct and install 81 end-cap

muon A muon ( ; from the Greek letter mu (μ) used to represent it) is an elementary particle similar to the electron, with an electric charge of −1 '' e'' and a spin of ''ħ'', but with a much greater mass. It is classified as a ...

chambers. Marin was a co-author on 266 publications during his career.In Memoriam - Alexandru A. Marin (1945 - 2005)
", ''ATLAS eNews'', December 2005 (accessed 5 November 2007). He died suddenly in 2005 after contracting

necrotizing fasciitis Necrotizing fasciitis (NF), also known as flesh-eating disease, is an infection that kills the body's soft tissue. It is a serious disease that begins and spreads quickly. Symptoms include red or purple or black skin, swelling, severe pain, fever ...

, a rare and rapidly progressing infection.

References

Sources

Alex Marin Memorial Pictures
. *

, ''ATLAS eNews'', December 2005 (accessed 5 November 2007).

External links

Scientific publications of Alexandru Marin
on

INSPIRE-HEP INSPIRE-HEP is an open access digital library for the field of high energy physics (HEP). It is the successor of the Stanford Physics Information Retrieval System (SPIRES) database, the main literature database for high energy physics since the 1 ...

{{DEFAULTSORT:Marin, Alexandru 1945 births 2005 deaths American people of Romanian-Jewish descent American physicists Boston University faculty Experimental physicists Harvard University faculty Massachusetts Institute of Technology School of Science faculty Particle physicists People associated with CERN Romanian emigrants to the United States Deaths from necrotizing fasciitis