Franco Rasetti

Franco Dino Rasetti (born August 10, 1901 in Castiglione del Lago , Italy , † December 5, 2001 in Waremme , Belgium ) was an Italian physicist.

Life

Rasetti was born in Castiglione del Lago in 1901 . He was mainly interested in zoology and botany since his youth. At the University of Pisa , at the request of his father, he began to study engineering, but switched to physics under the influence of Enrico Fermi , with whom he became friends. In 1922 he received his doctorate in Pisa and then lecturer at the University of Florence at the chair of Antonio Garbasso (1871-1933), who was then mayor of Florence. In Florence, where he was also with Fermi, he dealt with atomic physics. In 1927 he came to the University of Rome as the first assistant to Orso Mario Corbino (1876–1937), Professor of Experimental Physics and Director of the Physics Institute. Fermi, who was also responsible for bringing Rasetti to Rome, acted as the central figure in a separate school of physicists. In 1928 Rasetti became a member of the Partito Nazionale Fascista . In 1928/29 Rasetti was at Caltech with Robert A. Millikan , where he worked on the recently discovered Raman effect , which brought him international recognition. In the spectra he encountered deviations from the theoretical predictions, which were later attributed to the existence of the neutron in the atomic nucleus (which changed the particle statistics in some atomic nuclei compared to the assumption of the structure only from protons and electrons, from Fermist statistics to bose statistics or the other way around). At Caltech he also met Arnold Sommerfeld and Werner Heisenberg , with whom he became friends. Soon after, he turned to nuclear physics. In 1931/32 and 1934/35 he was in the laboratory of Otto Hahn and Lise Meitner in Berlin. In 1934 he became a professor in Rome. In 1939, shortly before the outbreak of World War II, he went to Laval University in Canada, where he founded the Physics Institute and worked on cosmic rays. There was Bruno Pontecorvo one year his assistant. During the war, he turned down an offer to work in the group around Hans von Halban at the University of Montreal in the area of ​​the British part of the Manhattan Project (there were among others George Placzek , Pontecorvo). In the 1940s and 1950s, for example, he worked on neutron physics and elementary particle physics, using cosmic radiation and being one of the first to observe the decay of the muon in the laboratory. In 1947 Rasetti went to Johns Hopkins University as a professor , where he stayed until his retirement in 1970. Since 1952 he had the US citizenship. After his retirement in 1970 he went back to Italy.

Working in other areas

Rasetti has also been involved in paleontology since his time in Canada and collected trilobites , initially from a well-known site near Québec , where he immediately discovered new species. He read the works of Charles Doolittle Walcott and made contacts (on a mountain tour in British Columbia in 1941 ) with the trilobite expert Charles E. Resser from the Smithsonian . He continued his research, in which he discovered hundreds of new species and also revised the classification, later in the USA and achieved a high reputation in this field: in 1952 he was awarded the Charles Doolittle Walcott Medal of the National Academy of Sciences . In 1964 he became an Honorary Research Associate with the Smithsonian. He donated his entire collection (around 50,000 copies in total) to the Smithsonian and the Canadian Museum of Nature, and those from his later collecting and research activities in south-west Sardinia to the Museum of the Geological Service of Italy in Rome. Now he kept one copy that was completely preserved (which is rare) and came from Mount Stephen in British Columbia.

Rasetti also collected beetles from his youth and later became an expert on orchids native to Italy and the Alps . His interest in botany began at Johns Hopkins University. He was also a passionate mountaineer, a hobby he had pursued, for example, with his friend Fritz Zwicky in California. In 2001 he died at the age of 100 in Waremme , Belgium , his last place of residence.

Web links

• Caltech oral history interview (English) Interview with Franco Rasetti. (PDF file; 2.23 MB)

Individual evidence

1. ^ Website of the Accademia dei Lincei , accessed on December 10, 2019.
2. ↑ Rasetti Raman effect in gases , Nature Volume 123, 1929, p. 205. Rasetti On the Raman effect in diatomic gases , Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci., Vol. 15, 1929, pp. 234, 515