Sandy Donnachie, a particle theorist and scientific leader, passed away on 7 April 2025.
Born in 1936 and raised in Kilmarnock, Scotland, Sandy received his BSc and PhD degrees from the University of Glasgow before taking up a lectureship at University College London in 1963. He was a CERN research associate from 1965 to 1967, and then senior lecturer at the University of Glasgow until 1969, when he took up a chair at the University of Manchester and played a leading role in developing the scientific programme at NINA, the electron synchrotron at the nearby Daresbury National Laboratory. Sandy then served as head of the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University from 1989 to 1994, and as dean of the Faculty of Science and Engineering from 1994 to 1997. He had a formidable reputation – if a staff member or student asked to see him, he would invite them to come at 8 a.m., to test whether what they wanted to discuss was truly important.
Sandy played a leading role in the international scientific community, maintaining strong connections with CERN throughout his career, as scientific delegate to the CERN Council from 1989 to 1994, chair of the SPS committee from 1988 to 1992, and member of the CERN Scientific Policy Committee from 1988 to 1993. In the UK, he chaired the UK’s Nuclear Physics Board from 1989 to 1993, and served as a member of the Science and Engineering Research Council from 1989 to 1994. He also served as an associate editor for Physical Review Letters from 2010 to 2016. In recognition of his leadership and scientific contributions, he was awarded the UK’s Institute of Physics Glazebrook Medal in 1997.
The “Donnachie–Landshoff pomeron” is known to all those working in the field
Sandy is perhaps best known for his body of work with Peter Landshoff on elastic and diffractive scattering: the “Donnachie–Landshoff pomeron” is known to all those
working in the field. The collaboration began half a century ago and when email became available, they were among its early and most enthusiastic users. Sandy only knew Fortran and Peter only knew C, but somehow they managed to collaborate and together wrote more than 50 publications, including a book Pomeron Physics and QCD with Günter Dosch and Otto Nachtmann published in 2004. The collaboration lasted until, so sadly, Sandy was struck with Parkinson’s disease and was no longer able to use email. Earlier in his career, Sandy had made significant contributions to the field of low-energy hadron scattering, in particular through a collaboration with Claud Lovelace, which revealed many hitherto unknown baryon states in pion–nucleon scattering, and through a series of papers on meson photoproduction, initially with Graham Shaw and then with Frits Berends and other co-workers.
Throughout his career, Sandy was notable for his close collaborations with experimental physics groups, including a long association with the Omega Photon Collaboration at CERN, with whom he co-authored 27 published papers. He and Shaw also produced three books, culminating in Electromagnetic Interactions and Hadronic Structure with Frank Close, which was published in 2007.
In his leisure time, Sandy was a great lover of classical music and a keen sailor, golfer and country walker.
