Bruno Pontecorvo Biography

Bruno Pontecorvo

(Pisa, 1913-Dubna, 1993) Italian physicist, pioneer in the study of the physics of neutrinos and their cosmological implications.He was an assistant student of Enrico Fermi in Rome, in the famous studies on the braking of neutrons prior to the achievement of the fission chain reaction of uranium.He carried out nuclear isomerism work in Paris under the direction of Frédéric Joliot-Curie, son-in-law of the famous Marie Curie.He was the first to theoretically establish that the muon decays into an electron without photon emission.He proposed a radiochemical method of detecting neutrinos from both the Sun and nuclear reactors and formulated for the first time the universality of the weak nuclear interaction of the electron and muon with nucleons.

Bruno Pontecorvo

Affiliated with the Italian communist party, Bruno Pontecorvo firmly believed in the Soviet project, and for this purpose he moved to the Soviet Union in 1950, which caused a considerable stir in the Western authorities, and it was a sure cause that he was denied the awards of which he undoubtedly deserved.Three months after his arrival he was working in Dubna, in whose laboratory a synchrocyclotron had been built.Pontecorvo undertook studies on the interaction between negative pions and nuclei and the production of neutral pions in collisions between nucleons.He formulated, simultaneously and independently from A.Pais, the hypothesis of the associated production of hyperons and heavy mesons in the strong interaction, verified several years later in the cosmotron and which gave rise to the property called strangeness, a quantum number that gave origin of one of the quarks in Murray Gell-Mann's theory.

In 1957 he presented a brief report on the possibility that one type of neutrinos could transform into another, as an analogy of what happened with kaons neutral.This theory, called oscillations, was experimentally verified in 1999.Going deeper into the idea, he proposed in 1959 the existence of a muon neutrino, different from that produced in the normal decay of nuclei, and indicated an experiment for its identification in a particle accelerator.His experiment, carried out by American physicists Leon Lederman, Melvin Schwartz, and Jack Steingerger in the Brookhaven laboratory, had the result predicted by Pontecorvo, and earned American scientists the Nobel Prize in Physics.

He also proposed, that same year, the possibility that there was production of neutrinos in pairs in the braking radiation or bremsstrahlung of fast electrons by collision with nuclei, a process that takes place in certain stages of stellar evolution and represents a important role in the energy balance of the universe.In 1956 he pointed out the possibility of exotic antiproton annihilation reactions in a nucleus, several months before Emilio Segrè discovered the antiproton.The experimental investigation of these processes, which today are called the Pontecorvo reactions, was carried out thirty years later-when the technique was possible-and has become a very active field of research.

In 1958 he was elected associate of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, and a full member in 1964.Pontecorvo was a professor at Moscow State University, where he held the chair of elementary particle physics, and was awarded the Lenin Prize.The scientific recognition of his activities, however, was overshadowed by his non-attendance at international congresses, as the Soviet state denied him the necessary visa.

Only the pressure of its director made it easier for him to travel, since 1959, to the countries of the Soviet area of influence.This limitation deeply depressed him.When a campaign was unleashed in his country to discredit his colleague Andrei Sakharov for openly formulating the need for in-depth reform of the Soviet state, he refused to participate, further antagonizing him with the authorities of his adopted homeland.The first time he was allowed to return to his country was in 1978, when he was already showing symptoms of Parkinson's disease, for treatment.

Bruno Pontecorvo was a prolific author of articles by research, as well as a lucky Russian translator of Enrico Fermi's works, which were published in 1971.An international award has been established in his memory for the most outstanding individual works in particle physics.

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