It is our sad duty to announce to the physics community and the wider public that the eminent plasma theorist and research organizer Karel Jungwirth has passed away.
He graduated from the Faculty of Technical and Nuclear Physics of the Czech Technical University in Prague in 1963 and became a researcher at the Institute of Plasma Physics of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences (IPP). He was awarded the degree of Candidate in 1966 and of Doctor of Physical and Mathematical Sciences in 1992. In the Czech Academy of Sciences, he was entrusted with the management of the Research Area of Mathematics, Physics and Earth Sciences in 1991, from 1993 he was a member of the Presidium of the Academy Council of the Czech Academy of Sciences, and from 1997 he served as a Vice-President of the Czech Academy of Sciences
Starting in 1965, when as a Ph.D. student he worked at the Kurchatov IAE in Moscow for six months, he participated in a number of short secondments abroad. In 1990–91, he was a lecturer at the University of Texas in Austin, while concurrently working at its Institute for Fusion Studies. He supervised a number of theses and lectured in the course cycles for the Ph.D. students of our Academy.
His main areas of professional interest were high-temperature plasma physics and controlled nuclear fusion, plasma instabilities, collective process theory, weak and strong turbulence, pulsed power systems for high-current charged particle beams, and, in the recent years, also high-power laser systems.
In 1998 he was appointed a member of the Czech Government Council for Research and Development and was re-elected Vice President of the Engineering Academy of the Czech Republic. From 1999, he was the Czech Republic's delegate to the EURATOM Committee for research and training programme in the field of nuclear energy. He was a member of the science councils of the Czech Technical University, Faculty of Mathematics and Physics of Charles University and the Institute of Nuclear Research in Řež. He participated in the preparation of a number of conceptual documents of the Czech Academy of Sciences, in the formulation of the draft National Research and Development Policy of the Czech Republic and other materials. In 2001–2007 he held the position of Director of the Institute of Physics of the Czech Academy of Sciences (FZU). In 2011 he received the Ernst Mach Honorary Medal for Merit in Physical Sciences. He was instrumental in the establishment of the PALS Research Centre, of which he was the Director for many years. We will discuss this further on a more personal level.
We always thought of Karel as of an excellent physicist and a friendly colleague, even when he was an ordinary researcher at the Institute of Plasma Physics (IPP). He never hesitated to provide advice or an answer to this or that technical query, and his presentations at local meetings held regularly at IPP, which we had the pleasure of attending, were always interesting and fruitful, with a great deal of his own original results, serving also as a valuable inspiration for the audience from other branches of plasma physics, but above all they testified to his deep knowledge of the physics of thermonuclear plasma.
Later, however, Karel intervened in the science cultivated at FZU in a much more substantial way. It was at the time when he was already in charge of the Research Area of Mathematics, Physics and Earth Sciences at the Presidium of the Academy of Sciences and he also became a vice-president of the Academy. And it was also the time when the possibility of taking over the high-power iodine photodissociation laser power system Asterix IV from the Max-Planck-Institut für Quantenoptik (Max-Planck Institute for Quantum Optics) in Garching near Munich emerged.
This high-power laser system was beyond anything available to Czech physics at the time, and the offer was therefore very attractive. However, to operate a laser of this calibre you also need an adequately equipped laser laboratory, and it was very difficult to find a space for it in the Czech Republic, both within and outside the Czech Academy of Sciences. After months of fruitless search, when it became clear that the placement of such a large system could not be circumvented by some improvisation, we finally went to Karel at the Presidium of the Academy, where we described to him our almost unsolvable situation.
Karel did not need a lengthy explanation, he immediately understood that this was a unique opportunity for Czech science that should not be wasted and offered his own solution – establishing a joint laboratory between the Institute of Physics and the Institute of Plasma Physics, later named the PALS Research Centre, including a new building built and equipped according to the Garchin model. Karel Jungwirth also promised to do everything in his power to secure the necessary funding to build the new laboratory.
The first step was an approval of this plan by the Academy Assembly of the Czech Academy of Sciences, which happened on the earliest possible occasion. The Budget Committee of the Chamber of Deputies was also supportive and increased the science budget by an amount corresponding to the cost of the project even on a permanent basis. It was then up to us to arrange for the actual construction on the vacant land of the Institute of Plasma Physics and also for the moving and commissioning of the system in Prague. This was achieved thanks to Karel's unfailing support within three years from the official takeover of the Garching system in 1997.
The successful operation of the iodine system in Prague, closely monitored by German colleagues and other European researchers, opened up further possibilities for the subsequent extension of this field in the Czech Republic.
In Brussels, Karel participated in the creation of the Road Map, i.e. a plan for the construction of other large research experimental facilities within the EU, and the Czech Republic naturally offered itself as a host for the next generation of large laser systems. Moreover, someone had the happy idea (Karel never boasted about it, but it might well have been him) that the so-called structural funds helping the new EU members to overcome the differences between the old and the new EU member countries could be used to finance these projects. Brussels agreed to this, and so some of the projects planned in the Road Map went quite naturally to the new member states.
In our country, this led to the next large laser laboratory, ELI Beamlines, being established at Dolní Břežany. Karel was no longer directly involved in its construction, among other reasons due to his failing health, but at least he lived long enough to witness the start of its user operation. It is clear, however, that without Karel's help and initiative, these large projects would have remained for the Czech science just a dream.
The above is just a fraction of the reasons why we will always remember Karel Jungwirth with respect and gratitude.
Karel Rohlena, Josef Krása, Libor Juha
Department of Radiation and Chemical Physics (PALS Centre)