Hans-Georg Zaunick

For me as well this was an absolute shock to hear about Hans' passing away. These news were so incredible for me that to the day I have not digested it properly. Why? How? What is the meaning of this? 

Hans was a wonderful colleague, polite and cheerful, not pushing himself in front but always competent and a real hard worker whom I appreciated from the first day of his career in PANDA. He developed into a central role for the MVD and at the same time acquired central knowledge of the Barrel EMC where he also took up a leading role in addition. Yet with all these burdens one could always rely on him to get answers and work constructively. And all this with the cheerful and calm manner that were his mark and made it such a pleasure to work with him. An wonderful person, an incarnation of a true, patient and relentless PANDA.

Whenever I follow these thoughts I still get wet eyes regarding this terrible loss. One of the strongest supporters of PANDA is gone. We are missing you dearly every day! 

Yours Lars

Lars Schmitt, PANDA Technical Coordinator

I got to know Hans as a student at TU Dresden. When I started a group there that was set to contribute to PANDA, he was one of the students who contributed and his diploma thesis was on early studies for the PANDA MVD. When we moved to Bonn, he decided to come along and pursue a PhD with further contributions to PANDA and the MVD.

After the successful defense of his seminal thesis, which covered much of what was to go into the technical design report for the MVD, we started to set up shop on Giessen. While developing the technical capabilities for silicon detector handling, he also assumed an important position for the electromagnetic calorimeter, eventually taking over the leading role in crystal assessment, prototyping, construction, and readout of the EMC barrel and other components. His contributions to PANDA are many. He grew into an independent scientist, advising students throughout their thesis work, maintaining laboratories, and developing instrumentation for applications as well as basic detector physics whenever and wherever needed.

In parallel, his reliable handling of the lab class for medical students and the course on applications of nuclear instrumentation took up a significant fraction of his time. Yet, he found the time to develop many additional activities in citizen science and outreach. Many of these revolve around astrophysics and astronomy, a pastime of Hans that he brought from the public observatory in Radebeul, where he had contributed in his school days. He made cosmic ray detectors available for schools and everyone else interested in the MuonPi project, developed a series of instrumented weather balloon flights, lab courses for school classes with and without Netzwerk Teilchenwelt, and tended to interns on a regular basis.

His pleasant demeanor and unobtrusive expertise made him an asset to any discussion and a team leader. I am grateful for the time we were allowed to work as a team and the opportunity to see him grow from a student in my group into an independent senior scientist. We will miss him.

Kai-Thomas Brinkmann