Ugo Fano

Ugo Fano

Ugo Fano (born July 28, 1912 in Turin , † February 13, 2001 in Chicago ) was an Italian theoretical physicist who worked in the field of atomic physics and in particular the quantum defect theory .

Fano was the son of the Turin professor of mathematics Gino Fano , from a wealthy Jewish family. He first studied mathematics in Turin, where he received his doctorate in 1934. He then joined Enrico Fermi's research group in Rome (known as the "Boys of Via Panisperna"), which also included his cousin Giulio Racah , also a prominent nuclear physicist. Here he developed his theory of "resonant configuration interaction" (Nuovo Cimento Vol. 12, 1935, p. 154, Physical Review, Vol. 124, 1961, p. 1866, the latter is one of the most cited physical review works), the interaction bound states with the continuum ( Fano resonance ). It explains the asymmetrical line shape of the spectra of noble gases thatHans Beutler (1896–1942) had found (Fano profile, generalized Breit-Wigner formula). From 1936 to 1937 he was with Werner Heisenberg in Leipzig.

In 1939 he married Camilla Lattes and emigrated to the USA in the same year before the increasing racism in Italy. There he first worked on the effects of radiation on living cells in Milislav Demerec's laboratory at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory . He chose the research area in Rome at Fermi's suggestion and other physicists were also active in it at the time, according to Max Delbrück , who later received the Nobel Prize for his bacteriophage research. Fano later devoted himself to the systematic research into the interaction of radiation with matter.

During World War II, he worked at the Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland, the US Army's ballistics research center.

After the war, he went to the National Bureau of Standards (NBS) in 1946, becoming the first full-time theorist at all. Here he worked closely with experimenters, particularly in the investigation of highly excited atomic states in the 1960s. In 1966 he became a professor at the University of Chicago .

For several decades he was one of the leading theoretical atomic physicists and was the central figure of a great school of atomic and molecular physics.

In 1995 he received the Enrico Fermi Prize . He was a Fellow of the American Physical Society since 1956, a member of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences since 1976 and a Fellow of the Royal Society since 1995 . His brother Robert Fano was a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at MIT.

literature

• Ugo and Lilla Fano Atomic and molecular physics , University of Chicago Press 1959
• Fano, Racah Irreducible tensorial sets , Academic Press 1959

Weblinks (English)

• R. Stephen Berry, Mitio Inokuti, ARP Rau: Ugo Fano 1912-2001 . In: National Academy of Sciences (Ed.): Biographical Memoirs . 2009 (English, nasonline.org [PDF]).
• Ugo Fano. In: Physics History Network. American Institute of Physics
• Charles W. Clark: Obituary Ugo Fano (1912-2001) . In: Nature . tape 410 , no. 6825 , 2001, p. 164 , doi : 10.1038 / 35065786 (English, nature.com ).
• On the absorption spectrum of noble gases at the arc spectrum limit . In: Nuovo Cimento . tape 12 , 1935, pp. 156 , arxiv : cond-mat / 0502210 (English, for Fano resonance; translation from Italian).
• In Memoriam Ugo Fano, Atomic Physicist, 1912-2001. (No longer available online.) Department of Physics, University of Chicago, archived from the original on March 2, 2001 .