It is with deepest sadness to announce the passing of
Professor István Dézsi, emeritus professor of the Wigner Research Centre for Physics, Budapest, Doctor of the Physical Sciences at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, foreign member of the Royal Flemish Academy of Belgium for Science and Arts.
He passed away on 17 January 2022 after short illness at the age of 88 and the memorial service was held on 10 February with the participation of the Hungarian Mössbauer community.
István graduated in chemistry from the Kossuth Lajos University in Debrecen in 1957. He prepared the radioactive source for and participated in the very first experiment when the Mössbauer effect was reproduced in a Budapest laboratory in November 1960. Later he applied Mössbauer spectroscopy to investigate various problems in the field of both chemistry and physics as well as in other disciplines. The structure of solutions and coordination complexes, phase transitions, relaxation phenomena, electron structure studies, texture effects, corrosion problems and many others belonged to his field of interest. Although he extended the experimental tools of his Budapest laboratory with positron annihilation by running life-time and angular correlation spectrometers and he also used some other techniques including those for pion chemistry, his focus stayed always with Mössbauer spectroscopy the international community of which he was a distinguished and respected member. He had collaborations with numerous Mössbauer laboratories worldwide, however his most decisive contacts were those with the Fachbereich Werkstoffwissenschaften, Universität des Saarlandes, Saarbrücken, Germany and the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium where he stayed in 1973, 1985–1990 and 1977–1978, 1980–1982, respectively. In Saarbrücken he started with the determination of the charge states and magnetic interactions in ferroelectrics, in Leuven with studying ion implanted systems and the growth of ultrathin layers, this latter subject being in the focus of his interest from 1977 irrespective of the location of his activity.
Beyond his scientific research, he was also active in university education and supervised some 30 students working for their diploma and doctoral degree. Furthermore, he served the Hungarian community as a scientific manager and took part in the work of reshaping the structure of the Hungariam Academy of Sciences after 1989.
We shall miss him. Our thoughts are with his family.
Judit Balogh, Wigner RCP
Dániel Géza Merkel, Wigner RCP
Dénes Lajos Nagy, Wigner RCP
Zoltán Németh, Wigner RCP
