With great almost unbearable sadness I have to inform you of a sudden death of Mikhail (Misha) Voloshin, one of great theorists of the golden age of HEP. He was born in 1953 in the Soviet Union. He appeared in the ITEP Theory Department very early in his career. His first student work (suggested to him by Okun and Kobzarev) was the false vacuum decay. He brilliantly solved this problem within a week, thus creating a beautiful theory of this phenomenon (independently and before Coleman). I vividly remember this fateful week and the excitement that followed.
Misha's career started right around the time of the discovery of the J/psi in November 1974 (The November Revolution). He became one of QCD's leading practicioners. He was a standard bearer in this area till his last days. He was a resource for both experimentalists and theorists throughout the world. He combined extremely high standards and principles with passion to physics as an experiment-based science. He hated questionable arguments and unsubstantiated assumptions.
In fact Misha was a universalist who thoroughly knew not only HEP, but all basic aspects of physics, he felt physics laws with his heart.
I and all my colleagues at FTPI will miss him. This is an understatement. Misha died on March 20, 2020 from heart failure. In fact, he was fighting lymphoma for some time.
-Misha Shifman