Obituary of Mineo Kimura

The community of collisional physicists lost one of its premier representatives. Prof. Mineo Kimura of Kyushu University had a truly international career, studying chemistry in his native Japan at Waseda University before attaining his doctoral degree in theoretical chemical physics in 1981 at the University of Alberta, Canada. He later carried out research in the United States at the University of Missouri, Rice University, the Joint Institute for Laboratory Astrophysics (JILA), and Argonne National Laboratory (ANL) before returning to Japan in 1996 as a professor at Yamaguchi University, first in the School of Medicine and then later in the Graduate School of Science and Engineering. He later became a Professor in the Department of Chemistry at Kyushu University. His research topics included electron collision and ionic collision dynamics, with particular emphasis on ionization and charge transfer processes, as well as radiation physics and positron‑molecule interactions. He had over 300 scientific publications and was a frequent contributor to scientific meetings. One of his most important publications, which continues to receive numerous citations every year, was a review article on the close‑coupling treatment of low‑energy heavy‑particle collisions written with Neal Lane in 1989.

Prof. Kimura was both a teacher and a good friend who developed many close relationships with colleagues throughout the world. He was a dedicated research advisor to a large group of undergraduate and graduate students, as well as postdoctoral associates. Mineo was a regular visitor to the Institute for Theoretical Atomic, Molecular, and Optical Physics at the Harvard‑Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Rice University, and the Universitaet Wuppertal in Germany. On a visit to the former in 1994, he wrote with Michael Jamieson and Alex Dalgarno an important paper on scattering lengths of atomic hydrogen, deuterium, and helium at ultracold energies.

He was an active promoter of international scientific collaboration leading efforts in US‑Japan cooperative research programs and workshops and fostering better interactions between Asian countries in atomic physics and fusion energy research. In 2005, Prof. Kimura received an award from the Chinese Academy of Sciences for this work and Kyushu University honored him with its 80th Memorial Award in 2006.

A memorial symposium was held in his honor at the University of Hokkaido on August 7, 2008 and the annual Kyushu University Chemistry and Material Science Symposium held in January 2009 was dedicated to Prof. Kimura. He will also be remembered at a US‑Japan conference in Kyoto this June that he had helped to organize before his passing. His enthusiastic and effective approach to solving problems in numerous areas of atomic and molecular physics, as well as his ever‑present humor and kindness, will be greatly missed. He is survived by his wife, Keiko Kimura, and three daughters, Kana, Mari, and Nao.