Dimona victims were a team in the physics lab and at home - Haaretz

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Fri., February 08, 2008 Adar1 2, 5768

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Dimona victims were a team in the physics lab and at home

By Ofri Ilani

Lyubov Razdolskaya, 73, who was killed in Tuesday's suicide bombing in Dimona, was a theoretical physicist who studied sub-atomic particles, like her husband Eduard Gedalin, 74, who is in critical condition due to injuries suffered in the attack.

Neither one is well known in Israel's scientific community. The couple immigrated to the country in the 1990s and settled in Dimona. They participated in Ben-Gurion University's program for absorbing immigrant scientists. Few acquaintances knew that they were talented scientists with decades of research in the Soviet Union behind them, but their colleagues in Be'er Sheva who knew them described them as brilliant scientists who made a significant contribution to particle physics.

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They coauthored several scientific articles, with titles such as "On convergence of the ChPT HFF expansion for one loop contribution to meson production in NN collisions" and "A Chiral Effective Field Theory and Radiative Decays of Mesons."

"Eduard was one of the greatest physicists I had the honor of working with," said a colleague at the BGU physics department, Prof. Amnon Moalem. "He could feel abstract things with his fingers." Moalem hired Razdolskaya and Gedalin to work in his laboratory, where they began studying the sub-atomic particles composed of a quark and and anti-quark, known as mesons.

"The head of the physics department asked whether Luba could join my research. Later I met her husband and the three of us worked together. We had great chemistry. He developed the formulas and she coded, entered the input into the computer and got the output. We worked together for a few years until they retired, in 2000. Their contribution to research was very significant," Moalem said.

"We dealt with reactions among elementary particles that are created with particle accelerators," Moalem explained. "Mesons are a type of particle that doesn't exist in nature. They have to be created artificially."

The couple came from Tbilisi, Georgia, where they worked at the Institute for Theoretical Physics of Georgia, a respected institution in the Soviet Union. Razdolskaya mainly studied cosmic radiation. "Eduard said that his grandfather had been a railroad engineer who helped build the railway to Georgia. He went there during World War II, and they stayed on."

The family of physicists also includes their son, Prof. Michael Gedalin, 44, a professor at BGU, and Konstantin, 44, also a physicist, who works in high tech. "They are very special people," Moalem says.

"They lived in an ordinary apartment building in Dimona but their home stood out because Eduard had planted grapevines along the walls. He was a man of culture, very special. I have no doubt that their absorption here could have been better. A scientist of Eduard's stature could have been a very prominent researcher but he came to a barren place that didn't meet the standards of the research institutions he came from."

Razdolskaya and Gedalin would have celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary this year.

The couple had been at the commercial center in Dimona for about an hour when the suicide bomber detonated his belt. Razdolskaya was sitting outside one of the stores, her husband standing next to her. Razdolskaya was killed on the spot, while Gedalin was critically wounded, with serious injuries to his abdomen. His identity was not discovered for several hours.

Razdolskaya was buried on Tuesday. Her husband continues to fight for his life in Soroka's intensive care unit.

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