I was saddened today upon hearing of the death of Franco Rimondi, a colleague in the CDF experiment. Franco was a professor of physics at the university of Bologna since 1980. His research in particle physics encompasses the last forty years, during which he collaborated with many experiments, starting with bubble chamber kaon decay studies in the late sixties, and then ADONE at Frascati in the seventies, and the split field magnet (SFM) at CERN. The experiment he spent most of his research career on was however probably CDF, at the Fermilab Tevatron collider.
I have known Franco since 1992, when I met him at Fermilab; I was still a undergraduate. He was a man of exquisite politeness and good manners; I don't think I have ever seen him raise his voice or argue for the sake of it. I never had a chance to directly work with him in the course of the last 19 years together in CDF, but I remember well his important contribution to the low-pT physics program of CDF, in the field of minimum bias, soft QCD, and related measurements.
