Dorin Mircea Stelian Poenaru (born April 9, 1936, Suiug, Bihor County) is a Romanian nuclear physicist and engineer.
Poenaru completed his higher education at the Emanuil Gojdu National College in Oradea where in 1953 he received a diploma of merit.
After passing the entrance examination, he studied at the Faculty of Electronics and Telecommunication of Politehnica University of Bucharest from which he graduated in 1958.
[2] Poenaru designed and built about 15 electronic instruments, including a counting-rate meter with industrial applications, a closed-circuit television system used at the cyclotron, a charge-sensitive low-noise amplifier and a precision pulse generator for a semiconductor detector spectrometer and a switching circuit for photomultiplier tubes.
He helped develop the theory of charge collection in semiconductor detectors and the formation of current or voltage pulses at the input of associated electronics.
He identified a new semi-empirical relationship (SemFIS) for half-life relative to alpha-decay based on fission theory, taking into account the shell effects.
The measured half-lives are in good agreement with theoretical predictions within the analytical superasymmetric fission (ASAF) model developed by Poenaru, W. Greiner, et al.
He and his coworkers published comprehensive tables of half-lives for cluster emission used by experimentalists and other theorist as a guide or a reference.
The systematics of experimental results updated in 2002 was useful to stress that the strong shell effect of the daughter nucleus 208Pb was not fully exploited, suggesting the need for new measurements.
An extensive study of alpha decay of superheavy nuclei was performed during the last decade, as a consequence of identifying new elements of the "island of stability".
The three fission models (ASAF, UNIV, and SemFIS) have been also applied to study the decay modes of superheavy nuclei produced in heavy ion fusion reactions at GSI Helmholtz Centre for Heavy Ion Research Darmstadt, Joint Institute for Nuclear Research Dubna, RIKEN Japan, and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, USA.
In 2005, when Alexandru Proca's death was commemorated, Poenaru used the opportunity to disseminate information about his relativistic equations of the massive vector boson field, as well as his life in Romania and in France.
He was mentioned with A. Săndulescu and W. Greiner in the New Encyclopædia Britannica[17] for calculations, published in 1980, indicating the possibility of a new type of decay of nuclei: heavy particle radioactivity.
The professional activity of some of the former students of this high school, including Prof. Poenaru, is presented in a small museum called the "Golden Book".