Aldo Menzione
Aldo Menzione (born June 18, 1943 in Massa , † December 23, 2012 in Pisa ) was an Italian experimental particle physicist. It is known as pioneer of silicon vertex detectors (Vertex Silicon Detectors, SVX).
Menzione studied from 1961 at the University of Pisa with the Laurea degree in 1967 (Production of neutral mesons decaying into all-neutral secondaries). From 1965 to 1968 he was part of the Karlsruhe collaboration at the Proton Synchrotron at CERN . From 1969 he was in the Pisa-Stony Brook Collaboration at the Intersecting Storage Rings (ISR) of CERN, which today is best known for the discovery of the increase in the total cross-section of proton-proton scattering with energy (it looked like this before as if the course were asymptotically flat). There one also found early manifestations of hadron jets in short-range correlations of particles from inelastic collisions.
In 1978, as a member of the team from Pisa, he built the small-angle spectrometer for the NA1 experiment at the SPS of CERN and at the NA7 experiment. The experiment provided new results in the physics of charm particles and mesons - form factors . Technical innovations were introduced, in particular an active target of layers of silicon strip detectors , which were used to investigate the decay of long-lived hadrons with charm and made it possible to measure their lifespan. This resulted in the development of silicon vertex detectors from 1985 for use in the CDF at the Tevatron in the Fermilab . Menzione was involved in the development of the CDF from 1980 (both on the tracking system and on the calorimeters). They enabled the detailed investigation of the secondary long-lived particles with heavy quarks from the jet events of the proton-antiproton collisions of the collider. His SVX system was installed in the CDF under his direction in 1992 and played an important role in the discovery of the top quark . For a more detailed investigation of the top quark (as well as hadrons with bottom and charm quarks), an improved version was later used, the SVX-II with fast trigger electronics (SVT, Silicon Vertex Trigger). He was responsible for the CDF-Pisa group until 2006 and then gave up the leadership for health reasons.
Menzione was also involved in the CLUE (Cerenkov light ultraviolet experiment) of the Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare (INFN) in Pisa from 1990 to 2000, a detector for cosmic rays in La Palma .
In 2009 he received the Panofsky Prize with Luciano Ristori .
Aldo Menzione is one of the initiators of the conference series "Pisa Meeting on Advanced Detectors", which takes place every three years, most recently in 2018 on Elba in the 14th edition.
Web links
- Obituary by Henry Frisch, Giorgio Bellettini, Physics Today ( Memento from February 2, 2013 in the Internet Archive )
- Panofsky Prize for Menzione
Individual evidence
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Menzione, Aldo |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | Italian physicist |
| DATE OF BIRTH | June 18, 1943 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Massa (Tuscany) |
| DATE OF DEATH | December 23, 2012 |
| Place of death | Pisa |