Gillo Pontecorvo (brother) Guido Pontecorvo (brother) Marco Pontecorvo (nephew)
Scientific career
Fields
Nuclear physics
Institutions
Collège de France Well Surveys Montreal Laboratory Chalk River Laboratories Atomic Energy Research Establishment Joint Institute for Nuclear Research
Academic advisors
Enrico Fermi
Bruno Pontecorvo (Italian:[ponteˈkɔrvo]; Russian: Бру́но Макси́мович Понтеко́рво, Bruno Maksimovich Pontecorvo; 22 August 1913 – 24 September 1993) was an Italian and Soviet nuclear physicist, an early assistant of Enrico Fermi and the author of numerous studies in high energy physics, especially on neutrinos. A convinced communist, he defected to the Soviet Union in 1950, where he continued his research on the decay of the muon and on neutrinos. The prestigious Pontecorvo Prize was instituted in his memory in 1995.
The fourth of eight children of a wealthy Jewish-Italian family, Pontecorvo studied physics at the Sapienza University of Rome, under Fermi, becoming the youngest of his Via Panisperna boys. In 1934 he participated in Fermi's famous experiment showing the properties of slow neutrons that led the way to the discovery of nuclear fission. He moved to Paris in 1936, where he conducted research under Irène and Frédéric Joliot-Curie. Influenced by his cousin, Emilio Sereni, he joined the Italian Communist Party, whose leader were in Paris as refugees, and as did his sisters Giuliana and Laura and brother Gillo. The Italian Fascist regime's 1938 racial laws against Jews caused his family members to leave Italy for Britain, France and the United States.
When the German Army closed in on Paris during the Second World War, Pontecorvo, his brother Gillo, cousin Emilio Sereni and Salvador Luria fled the city on bicycles. He eventually made his way to Tulsa, Oklahoma, where he applied his knowledge of nuclear physics to prospecting for oil and minerals. In 1943, he joined the British Tube Alloys team at the Montreal Laboratory in Canada. This became part of the Manhattan Project to develop the first atomic bombs. At Chalk River Laboratories, he worked on the design of the nuclear reactor ZEEP, the first reactor outside of the United States, which went critical in 1945, followed by the NRX reactor in 1947. He also looked into cosmic rays, the decay of muons, and what would become his specialty, neutrinos. He moved to Britain in 1949, where he worked for the Atomic Energy Research Establishment at Harwell.
After his defection to the Soviet Union in 1950, he worked at the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research (JINR) in Dubna. He had proposed using chlorine to detect neutrinos. In a 1959 paper, he argued that the electron neutrino ( ν e) and the muon neutrino ( ν μ) were different particles. Solar neutrinos were detected by the Homestake experiment, but only between one third and one half of the predicted number were found. In response to this solar neutrino problem, he proposed a phenomenon known as neutrino oscillation, whereby electron neutrinos became muon neutrinos. The existence of the oscillations was finally established by the Super-Kamiokande experiment in 1998. He also predicted in 1958 that supernovae would produce intense bursts of neutrinos, which was confirmed in 1987 when Supernova SN1987A was detected by neutrino detectors.
His father was a businessman. Gillo's siblings included brothers BrunoPontecorvo, an internationally acclaimed nuclear physicist and one of the so-called...
The BrunoPontecorvo Prize (Russian: Премия имени Бруно Понтекорво) is an award for elementary particle physics, established in 1995 by the JINR in Dubna...
three known states, as it propagates through space. First predicted by BrunoPontecorvo in 1957, neutrino oscillation has since been observed by a multitude...
Particle physicists knew that a mechanism, discussed back in 1957 by BrunoPontecorvo, could explain the deficit in electron neutrinos. However, they hesitated...
method for investigating neutrino oscillations was first suggested by BrunoPontecorvo in 1957 using an analogy with kaon oscillations; over the subsequent...
one of the BBC's 100 Women. In February 2020, she was awarded the BrunoPontecorvo Prize (2019) In September 2020, she was named an ordinary member of...
Scienza, Marco Tropea Editore, 2011, ISBN 88-558-0180-5 Zichichi, A.,"BrunoPontecorvo and his vision"; the content of the paper is a part of the special...
Physical Society Prize for Astroparticle Physics and Cosmology 2018: BrunoPontecorvo Prize for significant contribution to the IceCube detector construction...
(see below). Chlorine detectors, based on the method suggested by BrunoPontecorvo, consist of a tank filled with a chlorine-containing fluid such as...
Hieu [vi] Le Van Thiem Yuri Oganessian Lénárd Pál [hu] Heinz Pose BrunoPontecorvo Boris Arbuzov Aureliu Emil Săndulescu [ro] Albert Tavkhelidze Georgy...
the group were Edoardo Amaldi, Oscar D'Agostino, Ettore Majorana, BrunoPontecorvo, Franco Rasetti and Emilio Segrè. All were physicists, except for D'Agostino...
industrialists. He was one of eight children. He was a brother to Gillo Pontecorvo and BrunoPontecorvo. He was dismissed from his post in Florence in 1938, due to...
Union.[citation needed] BrunoPontecorvo, after he emigrated to the Soviet Union, was known as Бруно Максимович Понтекорво (Bruno Maximovich Pontekorvo)...
century, including the works of Enrico Fermi, Ettore Majorana, and BrunoPontecorvo. She is a professor of physics at the University of Genoa and an external...
yielded about 39% of the calculated number of neutrinos. In 1969, BrunoPontecorvo, an Italo-Russian astrophysicist, suggested a new idea that maybe we...
evaluation of the difference between the masses of neutra K-mesons (with BrunoPontecorvo, 1957). His book Weak Interaction of Elementary Particles, published...
which was soon joined by notable students such as Edoardo Amaldi, BrunoPontecorvo, Ettore Majorana and Emilio Segrè, and by Franco Rasetti, whom Fermi...
Manhattan District 1947, p. 9.23. Fidecaro, Giuseppe (4 December 1996). "BrunoPontecorvo: From Rome To Dubna (personal recollections)" (PDF). Università di...
Dmitry Budker and Alexander Sushkov Half-Life: the Divided Life of BrunoPontecorvo, Physicist or Spy - Frank Close Beyond: Our Future in Space - Chris...
enhance neutrino oscillation in matter. Wolfenstein received the 2005 BrunoPontecorvo Prize from The Scientific Council of the Joint Institute for Nuclear...
the J. Hans D. Jensen Prize of the University of Heidelberg, and the BrunoPontecorvo Prize "for his essential contributions to the study of close interrelation...
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