Gideon Yekutieli was one of the early fathers of experimental particle physics at the Weizmann Institute. He left a legacy of notable contributions to Israel and to the Weizmann Institute.
Gideon was born in Jerusalem in 1926. In his childhood, he got the polio disease with which he had to fight during all his life. He studied physics at the Hebrew University and in 1946 he joined the scientific research team of the Hagana. During the War of Independence he enlisted in the army's scientific unit (“Hemed”), based in the Sieff Institute (later to become the Weizmann Institute). He was one of the Israeli outstanding M.Sc. students that were sent to study Nuclear Physics abroad. After earning his Ph.D at the University of Bristol he returned to Israel in 1952 and established at Weizmann together with Yehuda Eisenberg the country's first particle physics laboratory. He was also a member of the Israeli Atomic Energy Commission and the National Committee for Space Research of the Israel Academy of Sciences.
In the first 10 years, the particle physics laboratory used a nuclear emulsion method of photograph plates to analyze cosmic ray particles arriving from space.
In the 1960s the laboratory moved to the Bubble Chamber method of pictures of particle interactions taken at high-energy accelerators in Europe and the U.S.A . Gideon and Yehuda initiated a big research group with the most advanced scanning and measuring equipment to study the particles produced in these interactions and the forces between them.
Since the end of the 1970s the leading technique became the use of electronic detectors in experiments of colliding beams. Gideon noticed the potential of the project LEP (Large Electron Positron) collider at CERN and took a major role in the decision of Weizmann to take part in this project.
Gideon and his colleagues developed a new detector that could collect and concentrate sun rays and use them to produce energy.
Gideon wrote his memoir in a book called “Days of Hemed”. He passed away in 1999 and was survived by his wife Rina and by three sons.