Mahir Saleh Hussein
Mahir Saleh Hussein passed away on 16 May 2019 in São Paulo, Brazil. He had a long and distinguished career in nuclear reaction theory, physics of exotic nuclei, accelerator physics, quantum chaos and applications to nuclei and mesoscopic systems, and Bose–Einstein condensation.
Mahir was born on 21 November 1944 in Baghdad, Iraq. He attended public schools in several districts of Baghdad and eventually entered the College of Science at the University of Baghdad (UB). He was the first graduate student of UB in 1965. In 1967 he went to MIT, where he was granted a PhD in physics in 1971 under the guidance of Arthur Kerman. Immediately after, Mahir accepted a position at the University of São Paulo (USP), where he worked for 47 years. By the end of his career he had published more than 300 papers in refereed journals.
Mahir was a distinguished Tinker Visiting Professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1979–80 and a visiting scientist at the Institute of Theoretical Atomic and Molecular Physics at Harvard University. He served as the scientific secretary of the DOE/NSF Nuclear Science Long Range Plan in 1995. Mahir served as the head of the nuclear physics department of the Instituto de Física of USP from 1995 to 1999. Then, he decided to install a superconducting solenoid system for production of radioactive ion beams at the university. He coordinated to obtain the first grant for the purchase of the solenoids and ancillary systems, a project which became known as RIBRAS, Radioactive Ion Beams in Brazil. He never stopped helping his colleagues with the theoretical interpretation of results obtained with RIBRAS.
Over the last 25 years, Mahir was involved rather heavily in four major research efforts: laser-driven accelerators, theoretical nuclear physics, quantum chaos theory and applications, and theory of Bose–Einstein condensation. He developed the reaction theory for exotic (neutron-or proton-rich) nuclei, a detailed model for the excitation and decay of multiple giant resonances and studied in details fundamental symmetry violation in nuclei. After his retirement in 2007, Mahir chaired the Non-Conventional Astrophysics group at the Advanced Studies Institute (IEA) of the USP, organizing yearly workshops on nuclear physics, Bose–Einstein condensation, quantum chaos, and cosmology.
Mahir was a J. S. Guggenheim Fellow in 1987–88 at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He was a Smithsonian Foundation Fellow in 1995 at MIT, where he worked with Kerman, Herman Feshbach, Ernest Moniz, and Franco Iachello (Yale) on nuclear reaction theory and the foundations of quantum mechanics. Mahir was a Martin Gutzwiller Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems in Dresden, 2007–08, working on quantum chaos and Bose–Einstein condensation. He was a member of the Brazilian Academy of Sciences and the World Academy of Sciences, and he was a fellow of the American Physical Society. He was proud to mention that he had always been very active in helping Iraqi scientists get involved in exchange programs. He was doing this through his association with the Iraqi Society for Higher Education Abroad, for which he was a member of the Board of Directors.
He is survived by his wife, Carmen (a psychology professor), and his daughter, Leila, who is an architect. Mahir is greatly missed.
