Farewell celebration Kees Harmans

has taken place today. Unfortunately I will not able to attend the dinner party promised to be ‘grand’. Yet the party at the University was quite significant and enjoyable (if accustom to Dutch catering). Chirstmas-like decoration of the room has been made of first pages of sci works of Kees, printed in various colors.

Kees was as usual: handsom, collected, sincere. There were two "official" speeches. Herre van der Zant, the department head, addressed all Kees’s career with a special stress on the course "mesoscopic physics" Kees has been giving many years thereby bringing up generations and generations of Quantum Transport students. Hans Mooij who has collaborated with Kees for twenty some years has told about his devotion to science and students and artistic skill to measure combatting and tricking noises. 

Guess everybody agrees that the most spectacular part of the party has been run by Raymond Schouten who demonstrated the "thermophone", a device that translated into sound noise the thermal noise in a resistor on the end of a long wire. Supervised by Raymond, Kees has demonstrated that noise intensity is propotional to the resistor temperature. He did so soaking the little one into cold beer, liquid nitrogen, and, finally, into liquid helium. That worked. Kees could not beat the teacher inside: he explained in detail the absolute temperature scale, the details and significance of the experiment. In the end of the part, he’s got a present: a functional pulse generator, indispensible tool for quantum manipulation.

Then Kees took the word. In his speech, he was mentioning phase and phases, interference and interaction, and applied these physical terms to human aspects of his long scientific carrier: promotion in Amsterdam, job in National Standard Instute, since 1987 nano(well, that time yet micro)structures in Delft, students (like van Wees and Kouwenhoven), quantum dots, hybrid structures, great sucsess of superconducting quantum bits, his main bisness of last ten years…

He mentioned the tragic death of his eldes son 13 years ago that hit and broke Kees at the rise of his scientific career.

Yet life goes on, Kees will remain active and gave us the list of his "life-after-TU-Delft" highlights: all sounded quite tempting. Also he won’t dissapear just like in a movie, we will see him in coming months.

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