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Nikolay Lyndin

AUG 20, 2018
(16 May 1953 - 17 July 2018) The physicist created software that’s still useful to scientists two decades later.
Olivier Parriaux
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Nikolay Mikhailovich Lyndin was born in Vitebsk, Bielorussia, on 16 May 1953. He studied physics at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology (MIPT) where he earned his Ph.D. in 1979 for research on glass and LiNbO3 integrated optics under the supervision of Alexander Prokhorov (1964 Nobel Prize in Physics). Nikolay joined the research team of Vladimir Sychugov at IOFAN in the 1990’s doing research on resonant gratings and laser systems.

Beginning in the early 1990s Nikolay became experimentally and theoretically involved with Sychugov’s team in a number of institutional and industrial European projects dealing with resonant gratings, biosensing, and second harmonic generation. He spent three years with Labsystems Affinity Sensors in England, where he filed a number of patents, and started the development of what was to become a full set of numerical solvers for periodically modulated and corrugated multilayer structures. Back at IOFAN in the early 2000s, Nikolay resumed teaching at MIPT while pursuing research on the spatial synchronization of laser arrays. His set of codes encompassing the RCWA, the true modal, and the Chandezon methods in both one and two dimensions became user-friendly products under the label MC Grating in 1999, with regular updates and continuous upgrades afterward. These numerical computer-aided design tools have the unique feature of being especially useful for the phenomenological understanding and design of electromagnetic resonant structures thanks to the scientific patrimony accumulated at IOFAN, and to Nikolay’s cooperation with a number of institutional and industrial laboratories worldwide.

Nikolay’s colleagues, friends, and partners deeply mourn his death in Moscow on 17 July 2018. He was a robust, coherent, intelligent, friendly, and reliable scientist.

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