Ernst-Helmut Brandt Succumbed to Cancer

September 9, 2011 (PO3). On September 1st 2011, Dr. Ernst-Helmut Brandt died peacefully (in his sleep) at home, thus succumbing to an inoperable pancreatic cancer. The vortex community in superconductivity thus lost one of best-known and respected theoreticians.

Ernst-Helmut Brandt was born in Berlin-Kaulsdorf on September 17, 1941, as the second son of the publisher and bookseller Helmut Brandt and Elise Brandt nee Stümpfle. His love of nature and his interest in technical tinkering Ernst Helmut developed already as a child. From October 1961 to June 1967, he studied physics at the University of Stuttgart and the Technical University and the Free University of Berlin (Summer 1966). From June 1967 to June 1969 he finished the doctoral thesis under Professor Alfred Seeger at the Max Planck Institute for Metals Research and the University of Stuttgart. From December 1969 to October 1970 he was a visiting scientist at the Lomonosov University in Moscow.

Since then, Ernst Helmut spoke fluently Russian and had many friends in and from the former Soviet Union. In 1970, at the age of only 29, he got a permanent position as researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Metals Research, Institute of Physics in Stuttgart. The main area of his work was the theory of vortices in type II superconductors. With over 330 publications including 32 Physical Review Letters, and the total number of  11, 400 citations (1 paper 763 times, another 640 times) and a Hirsch (h) – index of 58 he belonged to the most successful physicists of Germany. He served the community also by supervising numerous doctoral dissertations in many countries, partly in their native language. He had profound knowledge of Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Russian, Hebrew, Japanese, Chinese and Swedish. After retiring in September 2006, he continued his scientific work, was attending scientific meetings and continued publishing.

Ernst Helmut Brandt made a lasting contribution to his field of endeavor and will be remembered as a model of excellent working attitude and highly ethical behavior in research.

(Abbreviated and edited from a draft by Prof.Klaus Morawetz, Münster Univ. of Applied Science)