In Memoriam

Dec. 9, 2004

Bob Panvini died on Dec. 9, 2004, after a year-long battle with cancer. Bob received his B.Sc. in Physics from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 1958, and his Ph.D. in Physics (working in the Irwin Pless group at MIT) from Brandeis University in 1965. He joined the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Vanderbilt University as an Associate Professor in 1971, and was promoted to Professor in 1980. During his career Bob was an author on almost 600 papers with over 10,000 citations. He retired in 2004.

He began his career working with bubble chambers, but after some years became part of the community working towards electronic detectors, first with the hybrid bubble chamber facility at SLAC and shortly after that with the streamer chamber facility, also at SLAC. In the late 70’s, he was one of the founding members of the CLEO experimental program at Cornell, an early program that blazed a successful trail exploring the secrets of the b meson.

Following that same interest, it was a natural move to be part of
the new electron-positron experiment at SLAC, this time at the energy frontier, working on the SLD experiment at the first e plus-e minus linear collider. Here again, his motivating theme was the study of the b quark through the Z hadronisation. Under Bob’s leadership, Vanderbilt made vital contributions to the MC simulation efforts at a time when SLAC and the other collaborating institutions could not gather adequate computing resources. He was deeply interested in the physics and was an important part of the analysis team.

His last experiment was again at SLAC, working on the BABAR detector at the PEP II asymmetric electron position collider, producing hundreds of millions of B mesons each year, and still working to unravel the mysteries of the fifth quark, specifically their role in the CP violation process.

Bob was an enthusiastic researcher and a tireless worker. In all of his research activities, he helped build a coherent collaboration that worked effectively for physics.