Haim Goldberg, professor emeritus in the physics department at Northeastern University, passed away suddenly on 5 February 2017, while on a trip to Sarasota, Florida.
Goldberg was an internationally-recognized theoretical high-energy physicist. He received his BSc in 1959 at McGill University and his PhD at MIT in 1963. In 1963–64 he was an instructor and research associate at Brandeis University. He was a postdoctoral fellow at the Laboratoire de Physique Théorique, Orsay, France in 1964–65, and in 1965–67 he was a research associate at Cornell University. Goldberg joined Northeastern in 1967 as an assistant professor. He was promoted to associate professor in 1970 and full professor in 1975. Goldberg was a visitor to many high-profile research centers in the US and abroad. Those included the Aspen Center for Physics, CERN, Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, and Université de Nice. Goldberg’s research was supported by a continuous grant from NSF until his retirement in 2014.
Haim Goldberg was a gifted researcher and teacher. The scope of his research and teaching was exceptionally broad. For example, he developed a course on energy costing and consumption, which included a detailed discussion of alternative, renewable energy sources. His research included the exploration of new physics at colliders, neutrino physics, cosmic-ray physics (including possible black hole production and limits thereon), and cosmology. A piece of work for which Goldberg is very well-known concerns dark matter. In 1983 he realized that charge-neutral supersymmetric particles such as the neutralino and the photino were candidates for dark matter. In particular, he was the first to realize that many putative direct signatures of dark-matter annihilation were in fact suppressed by the velocity-squared of the annihilating dark matter (p-wave versus s-wave), a 10-6 suppression. That work garnered immediate international attention. Since then, there have been numerous underground and satellite experiments with designs based on his insight, searching to this day for such dark matter in the universe.
Over the past decade and a half, Goldberg, in collaboration with Luis A. Anchordoqui (former Northeastern postdoc, currently at Lehman College, CUNY) and Thomas J. Weiler (former Northeastern postdoc, currently at Vanderbilt University), has been investigating neutrinos, cosmic rays, and other astrophysical phenomena. More recently, with Anchordoqui and Tomasz R. Taylor (Northeastern), Goldberg explored experimental tests of string theory at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN.
Goldberg continued to be active in research after his retirement; he published several papers in the past year. At the time of his death, he was working on another paper with Anchordoqui and Weiler that concerned a non-equilibrium “fireball” of quark–gluon matter, a resulting large kaon-to-pion ratio, and a potential explanation of the high-energy muon excess observed in the Pierre Auger cosmic-ray experiment. The paper is scheduled to appear in Physical Review D.
As a mature adult, Haim followed twin passions. One revealed his interest in music. He took guitar lessons throughout his adult life, up until the time of his death. His other passion was good wine. At a dinner at his home or at a restaurant, all would gladly defer to Haim for the wine choice; Haim simply knew more about wines than the rest of the party combined. Haim would occasionally daydream about running a vineyard.
But what really sets Haim Goldberg apart from many men is his humanity. He showed much concern for his fellow man, for the future of the human race in general, and for his younger associates in particular. He cared. He was a man of integrity. He was a true mentor is every sense of the word. He is greatly missed, and his ilk is greatly needed.
Goldberg is survived by his wife Miriam Ercoli Goldberg, by his two children Joel and Maya and their spouses Cybill and Mike, and by five grandchildren: India Rose, Boaz, Sebastian, Saul, and Gray.
