Joachim Tückmantel (1948 - 2013)

The news of the sudden death of Joachim Tückmantel on 7 December 2013 filled us, his colleagues and friends, with immense grief and deep sadness. He passed away shortly after retiring from CERN where he worked for 40 years.

Joachim joined CERN in 1973 and made significant contributions to the design and understanding of particle accelerators. From the start, he was involved with superconducting RF technology and performed pioneering work for the LEP and PETRA cavities. In particular, he invented the DC bias to prevent the multipactor effect in the LEP2 RF system; this was essential for the success of LEP2. He authored the Semi Analytic Processor (SAP), the core of many electromagnetic simulation codes. He was equally expert in impedances and wake fields, and the mitigation of their effect.

Joachim was also a respected authority for both technology and simulation of RF systems, and his advice was sought out for many accelerators at CERN and worldwide. He made important contributions to the design of transverse damping systems, fast RF feedback systems and crab cavities for the LHC luminosity upgrade. His clever way of generating controlled RF noise is used now in both the SPS and the LHC accelerators to ensure beam stability. Joachim spent many days and nights in the Faraday Cage participating in the SPS machine development sessions.

Joachim was valued for his deep knowledge and expertise, as well as for his ideas and initiative. He was enthusiastic about everything he did. This included computing, Chinese cooking, reading... His exceptional instinct for physics often helped him know the answer before any calculations had been done. Beyond his professional qualities, Joachim will be remembered by all of us for his humour and kindness, as a friend, as a colleague, as a mentor. His many jokes are still repeated; he enjoyed talking to people and making them laugh.

It will be very difficult to accept that Joachim is not with us anymore, that we cannot have his advice and see his kind smile.

Our thoughts are with his wife Jutta, their four children and their families, to whom we offer our sincere condolences.

His colleagues and friends