Alexandre Valentinovitsh Tishchenko

Alexandre Valentinovitsh Tishchenko lost his long battle to cancer and passed away on 24 August 2016 at the age of 58.

His talent was recognized early on: he was awarded the USSR Academy of Sciences prize of the best scientific work of a young scientist for his PhD under the supervision of Nobel Prize winner A.M. Prokhorov focused on “Study of stripline and periodic structures for integrated optics’’ (Исследование полосковых и периодических структур для интегральной оптики). At the beginning of the eighties in the team of V.A. Sychugov at the Institute of General Physics he made an exhaustive analysis of grating waveguide resonant phenomena by means of the Rayleigh approximation, and revealed their properties, e.g., resonant reflection. He also analyzed the phenomenon of plasmon self-generation of ripples at metal and semiconductor surfaces and found incidence conditions for writing spatially highly coherent surface undulations.

Since the political shifts of the early nineties he became involved in European and industrial projects mainly directed to the exploitation of resonant waveguide grating properties for biological, anti-counterfeiting and laser emission control applications with a number of publications and patents. At the end of the nineties he gradually joined what was to become the Hubert Curien Laboratory of Jean-Monnet University, France, where he became professor in 2000. He assigned himself there two main general objectives : the first one was a rigorous method for the modeling of large scale structures of arbitrary refractive index distribution in the aim of subverting the application domain so far exclusively held by approximate scalar methods with a calculation time proportional to the number N of diffraction orders considered (instead of the common N³) and absence of memory saturation; he also further developed the true-mode method and cooperated in coordinate transform methods for metallic structures using his « Generalized Source Method ». The second objective was to develop the phenomenological intelligibility of complex coupled systems; he did so by developing a general coupled wave formalism which he applied for instance to explain why and how coupled plasmon systems can be made excess-loss free, as well as to the exact modeling of unusually large systems of strongly coupled metal nanoparticle of non-spherical shape. As to the first application, he needed a reference method that he found in the very Rayleigh hypothesis which he confirmed by an astute numerical implementation to provide a precise solution of the grating problem when it converges, thus to notably extend its domain of stability.

Alexandre Tishchenko was a very modest person with a great sense of humour, extremely kind to his partners and colleagues, always available to swiftly question the physical relevance of hypotheses and to brilliantly shed light on complex problems.

Optical sciences have lost a superior intelligence in full maturity of his highly-creative power. The undersigned acknowledge Alexandre Tishchenko’s scientific contributions and mourn his premature death.

This obituary was contributed by: Prof. T. Benson, Nottingham University, UK; Prof. J. Chandezon, University of Clermont-Ferrand, France; Prof. J. Ctyroky, Czech Academy of Sciences; Dr. A. Erdmann, Fraunhofer IISB, Erlangen, Germany; Dr. D. Gallagher, Photon Design, UK; Prof. G. Granet, University of Clermont-Ferrand, France; Prof. H.P. Herzig, EPFL, Switzerland; Dr. B. Kress, Microsoft Corp; Research Director Ph. Lalanne, Institut d’Optique, France; Prof. Lifeng Li, Tsinghua University, China; Dr. N. Lyndin, Institute of General Physics Moscow, MC Grating; Prof. D. Maystre, Fresnel Laboratory, France; Prof. R. Magnusson, University of Texas at Arlington, USA; Prof. I. Montrosset, Politecnico di Torino, Italy; Prof. E. Popov, Fresnel Laboratory, France; Research Director A. Sentenac, Fresnel Laboratory, France; Dr. Ing. Th. Wriedt, Bremen University, Germany; Prof. F. Wyrowski, University of Jena, LightTrans GmbH, Germany.