Obituary of George Masek

George (Skip) Masek passed away last year after a lengthy illness. Skip was an experimental particle physicist who started his career in 1955 at the 1 GeV linear accelerator on the Stanford University campus, obtaining his PhD with Wolfgang Panofski as advisor. His thesis topic was muon scattering.

After moving in the early 60’s to the University of Washington for an appointment as Assistant Professor, he continued work on muon scattering but now using Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory’s Bevatron in the early 60’s. Later, he moved to UCSD and continued a collaboration with the University of Washington to measure magnetic moments of Strange Particles in a series of technically challenging experiments, also at the Bevatron.

In the late 60’s Skip submitted proposals to SLAC to search for a heavy lepton (that new flavor of lepton would have been the third) but his proposal was not accepted. That his proposal showed great foresight and intuition may be judged from the fact that precisely such a lepton was found later at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) which discorery was awarded the Nobel Prize. Also at that time, he designed and built the Lambda beta decay experiment at LBL, a major construction job that involved a large, high pressure gas Cerenkov counter.

In the 70’s Skip moved his research program to the then newly constructed electron-positron collider SPEAR at SLAC where his team discovered new bound states of a charm and anti-charm quark and his research on photon-photon collisions was started. The energies at SPEAR were found to be too low for the study of photon-photon collisions so Skip moved his research to the then new PEP electron-positron collider where he became spokesman of the by then large collaborative effort.

After his retirement in the early 90’s Skip could not sit still but started a search for Magnetic Monopoles (“slowly moving cosmic rays”) and Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs, a form of Dark Matter) on the UCSD campus. The monopole search experiment set an upper limit on their flux and a successful prototype detector for WIMPs was developed. It was left to other to scale it up to the size needed for a meaningful search for WIMPs.

George Masek advised a large number of graduate students and postdocs (and yes, some faculty as well) who went on to have successful careers in particle physics. He was very smart but never let that show. He was a true gentleman. His colleagues will miss him.

Wayne Vernon

Hans P. Paar