'Adrianfest' honors career of physicist

Melissinos

More than 125 physicists and other colleagues attended the symposium on "Probing Luminous and Dark Matter" at the Hyatt Regency Hotel in downtown Rochester. The celebration was in honor of Adrian Melissinos, professor of physics, who turned 70 this summer. Nobel laureate Leon Lederman, who has worked closely with Melissinos, was among the physicists from around the world who discussed future directions in particle physics.

Born in Thessaloniki, Greece, Melissinos attended the Greek naval academy and then joined the Royal Hellenic Navy in 1948. When his tour of duty was up, he left the Greek navy and attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he earned his master's degree in 1956 and his Ph.D. in 1958. He immediately joined Rochester, where he has studied a gamut of questions about the nature of the universe.

"Adrian is as close to a Renaissance particle physicist as I know," said longtime colleague Thomas Ferbel, professor of physics. "He has a broad range of interests. Some of us keep repeating our thesis for the rest of our lives; Adrian is not like that. He goes out and constantly looks into new areas, with the right combination of technical skill and intuition to make a go of it."

During his four decades at the University, Melissinos has used all of the world's most powerful particle accelerators, including those at Fermilab, Brookhaven National Laboratory, CERN and DESY in Europe, and Cornell and Stanford Universities. Using such conventional equipment, he often goes on a search for the exotic.

He recently earned headlines around the world for the results of an innovative experiment where his team brought together high-energy electrons traveling near the speed of light, produced by Stanford's two-mile-long accelerator, and photons from a powerful "tabletop terawatt" glass laser developed at the Laboratory for Laser Energetics. By dumping an incredible amount of power--nearly as much as it takes to run the entire nation but lasting only a tiny fraction of a second--into an area less than 1 billionth of a square centimeter, the team created particles of matter from pure light.

To explain his fascination with such processes, Melissinos said simply, "I love the joy of discovery, and of sharing that discovery with others."

A fellow of the American Physical Society and the National Academy of Athens, he has been a visiting scientist at several laboratories and universities around the world. He has more than 150 publications, along with four textbooks and several monographs, to his credit. His book on experimental physics has become a classic--a standard used in almost all undergraduate and graduate laboratory physics courses around the world.

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