Ionel Solomon passed away

Our colleague Ionel Solomon left us on June 29, 2015, after a long and fruitful career of physicist extending from 1953, at age 24 to the very end of his life, at age 86.

After completing his studies at Ecole Polytechnique, Paris, he joined the Commissariat à l'Energie Atomique in 1953, where he came to work with Anatole Abragam, and co-founded with him the celebrated «  Laboratoire de Résonance Magnétique » at Saclay, which he left in 1962 for becoming professor at Ecole Polytechnique and founding the Laboratory of Condensed Matter Physics.

His activity in Magnetic Resonance, limited to the period 1955-1965, was marked by a profound impact, particularly on NMR, with such seminal discoveries as cross-relaxation between spins species in solution, still of fundamental importance for structure elucidation, an earth-field magnetometer, bolometric detection of resonance or first proposal of thermal mixing in the rotating frame between electronic and nuclear spins as a fundamental mechanism of dynamic nuclear polarization (DNP) in insulating solids.

The rest of his career, at Ecole Polytechnique, was devoted to the physics of semi-conductors, optical pumping in solids, spin-dependent transport, research on new materials, in particular amorphous etc. where less and less magnetic resonance was of use. He became a world expert in hydrogenated amorphous silicon and its use for photovoltaic solar cells. Despite the hopes raised by these materials, they never gave rise to a practical source of energy production.

Ionel Solomon, modest and non fussy as he was, left a strong impression on all those who came in contact with him and had a lasting influence on his students, searchers in his laboratory or mere attendents at his formal lectures.

Ionel Solomon was an  ISMAR Fellow, selected in  the first round.

Maurice Goldman