Obituary of Ignazio Fidone

Ignazio Fidone, a prominent figure in the theory of electromagnetic waves in hot plasmas, died on 4 June 2007 at his home in Siracusa, Italy.

After graduating from the University of Palermo (Italy), Fidone joined the Euratom (European Community Institution for Atomic Energy) and was assigned to the ½ Commissariat α l Energie Atomique, the French Institute for Atomic Energy, where he worked for the rest of his career, before retiring in 1995 at the Euratom level of Division Head. He spent many years at the Research Center of Fontenay-aux-Roses, near Paris, before moving to the site of Cadarache, in the South of France, where the international project ITER (International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor) is located.

Fidone gave several outstanding contributions in the theory of wave-plasma interactions, for which he was considered a world leader. Radiofrequency waves are now commonly used in magnetized plasma configurations, such as tokamaks and stellarators, both to heat and diagnose plasma as well as to drive currents non-inductively. He produced several seminal works in this area, developing the basic theory for coupling and absorbing lower hybrid and electron cyclotron waves. One of his most outstanding results was to identify the ubiquitous role of relativistic effects in the absorption of electron cyclotron waves.

Fidone collaborated with experimentalists, to develop innovative diagnostics of magnetized plasmas which exploited the wave-plasma interaction properties. He invented a new scheme to drive currents in a tokamak non-inductively, using the combination of electron cyclotron and lower hybrid waves. His prediction, based on challenging numerical kinetic calculations, that a synergy effect could take place when using the two waves together, was brilliantly confirmed by experiments on various tokamaks throughout the world.

A regular guest of the Plasma Physics Laboratory at the Princeton University, he had many collaborators and friends in the United States. All of them appreciated and enjoyed his very sharp sense of humor, the sharpness of mind, his deep scientific culture and his very peculiar way of applying his innate old Sicilian wisdom to the modern world and to scientific problems. This may be what his friends will miss the most, not only in their work, but also in their everyday lives.