Obituary of Edward Pollack

Professor Edward Pollack died after a brief but courageous struggle with brain cancer on February 11, 2005. Ed was the longest serving member of his department at the University of Connecticut, Storrs, having joined the Physics Department in 1963. In January 2005, he and his wife Rita traveled to Pasadena, where Ed was doing research under his NASA grant at Jet Propulsion Laboratory /CalTech (JPL). Full of ideas and plans for the future, he had worked a full day in the lab on the day he was stricken.

Born in the Bronx in 1931, Pollack graduated from the City College of New York (1952), where he studied under Mark Zemansky among others. After completing his M.S. in 1954, Ed served as a researcher while in the U.S. Army at Fort Detrick in Maryland, then taught at both New York University and City College of New York while he earned his Ph.D. in physics from New York University (1963) under one of us (BB). His thesis pioneered the E-H gradient balance atomic beam technique for precision measurements of atomic polarizabilities. Already an experienced teacher and researcher, Ed received an appointment to teach physics at the University of Connecticut, Storrs immediately following his doctorate, remaining at Connecticut for more than forty years until his final illness forced his retirement.

Ed’s research at Connecticut was in experimental atomic and molecular physics, with particular interest in atomic collisions, including charge transfer, in the gas phase and with surfaces. He established a laboratory for the investigation of low-energy atomic collisions with funding from the U.S. Army Research Office, Durham, NSF, NASA and other funding sources. He was a pioneer in the measurement of inelastic energy losses in keV differential scattering of ions with atoms and molecules. Of particular interest were rovibrationally inelastic ion-molecule collisions. He and his students investigated the transition from small-angle collisions in which the scattering was from the target molecule as a whole, to larger-angle collisions where the scattering was primarily with one atom of the target dimer. His recent work at UConn and JPL involved laboratory simulations of soft x-ray emission, related to highly-charged ion bombardment from solar wind on comets. With two of us (QK and WWS), Ed used facilities in Ara Chutjian’s lab at JPL to make high-resolution measurements of emission spectra from a gas cell containing molecular gases found in comets, for comparison with space-based data and solar wind models.

In addition to his career at Connecticut and recent work at JPL, Ed has participated in experiments using the EBIT highly-charged ion traps at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and N IST. In 1974, a NATO grant permitted him to begin a fruitful collaboration with the group of Michel Barat at the Laboratoire des Collisions Atomiques et Moleculaires in Orsay, France. In 1987, Ed took a sabbatical as Visiting Professor of Physics at Yale. Ed published frequently, particularly in Physical Review, and gave talks at conferences on nearly every continent. He was a Fellow of the APS, a member of AAPT and Sigma Xi.

Ed was a superb teacher who spent long hours assisting students in class and in his office. He supervised more than 20 Ph.D.'s, taking great pride in their successes. He served on nearly all departmental and many university committees, including chairing the Faculty Teaching Assignments Committee and advising Sigma Pi Sigma, the physics honor society. He also served on the advisory board of the state’s public television station (CPTV).

We remember Ed remaining a dyed-in-the wool New Yorker, with a great sense of humor and a love of life. Ed shared with family and colleagues his passion for science, culture and classical music. A devoted family man, he and Rita took great pride in the significant professional success of all three children.

In 1984, Ed organized a successful national meeting of the Division of Electron and Atomic Physics of the American Physical Society at Storrs (he repeated that virtuoso performance in 2000). At the 1984 meeting, he met future Nobel Laureate Claude Cohen-Tannoudji, who summed up our own feelings when he wrote recently after learning of Ed’s death: I was immediately impressed by his energy and by his enthusiasm for physics...[later] Ed and Rita visited us at home [in Paris]... Ed was so full of life, so energetic, so happy to exchange ideas with new people. We keep wonderful recollections of this visit. We all miss Ed.