PARTICLE PHYSICS

DESY mourns the death of Prof. Dr. Dres. .h.c. Volker Soergel, long-time Chairman of the DESY Directorate and pioneer of the united DESY with locations in Hamburg and Zeuthen. Soergel passed away on 5 October at the age of 91. "Volker Soergel was one of the great visionaries of our research centre. An achievement that will always be associated with his name the Zeuthen Institute becoming part of DESY, a key success story of German unification,“ says Helmut Dosch, Chairman of the DESY Directorate. "Our thoughts are with his family."

His connection to the research centre began in the 1970s when, as a physics professor at the University of Heidelberg, he was elected chairman of the Scientific Council. From 1979 to 1980, he took over the role as Research Director at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research in Geneva, and returned to Hamburg in 1981 as Chairman of the DESY Directorate.

Volker Soergel was key in shaping the DESY we know today. During his twelve-year leadership, the HERA accelerator transformed from proposal into funded project and was completed on time and within budget. At the time, HERA was the largest fundamental-science project in Germany. DESY Directors Volker Soergel and Björn Wiik launched the "HERA model" – a major breakthrough in the financing and organisation of large-scale research projects that became a model for the implementation of many other international facilities. A total of eleven countries contributed at the time, which was a first in the history of particle physics research.

"It is thanks to Volker Soergel's courage, persuasiveness and leadership at DESY that HERA was able to find the backing of the scientific community worldwide and the political support to realise this major scientific project in Germany," says Beate Heinemann, Director of Particle Physics at DESY. “HERA's results on the structure of the proton are still invaluable today for evaluating data from the Large Hadron Collider LHC at CERN."

The second DESY site in Zeuthen, Brandenburg is also the result of Volker Soergel's visionary commitment. As early as 1985, four years before the fall of the Berlin Wall, he managed to reestablish scientific cooperation between DESY in Hamburg and the then Institute for High Energy Physics IfH in Zeuthen, an institute of the former Academy of Sciences of the GDR. An earlier collaboration had been stopped for political reasons in 1969.

When Germany was reunited in 1990, the science and research landscapes in the East and the West reorganised themselves. Volker Soergel ensured the continued existence of the Institute for High Energy Physics IfH as one of the first institutes in the GDR after reunification and merged it with DESY. This is considered as one of the great success stories of German reunification.

Volker Soergel also fostered DESY's competencies in other research areas. Early on, during his time as Chairman of the Scientific Council, he worked on plans to further scientifically exploit the potential of synchrotron radiation at the DORIS accelerator. Under his guidance, photon science became an important pillar of DESY research, first as a "by-product" of the accelerators used for particle physics, then, with the inauguration of HASYLAB in 1981 and the conversion of DORIS, as an established research field in its own right.

After his time as DESY Director, he joined the Max Planck Institute for Physics in Munich for four years as Executive Director.

In 1993, Volker Soergel was awarded the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany, First Class, for his services to the expansion of DESY and, above all, to the establishment of international scientific cooperation. Among many other honours and awards, he also holds honorary doctorates from the Universities of Glasgow (1994) and Hamburg (2009).

With his death, DESY loses one of its most influential figures. With his foresight and leadership, he played a decisive role in shaping DESY. The research centre is deeply indebted to him.