Giuseppe Cocconi

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Giuseppe Cocconi (* 1914 in Como ; † November 9, 2008 ) was an Italian physicist who dealt with elementary particle physics and was formerly Research Director at CERN .

life and work

As a teenager, Cocconi was primarily interested in astronomy. He studied physics at the University of Milan , where he received his diploma (Laurea) in 1937. From February 1938 he was in Rome at the invitation of Edoardo Amaldi , where he became part of the renowned physicist group around Enrico Fermi . Together with Fermi, he built a Wilson cloud chamber to demonstrate the decay of mesons from cosmic radiation (the main source of elementary particles of high energy in the pre-particle accelerator era). In August 1938 he returned to Milan and transferred the physical procedures learned in Rome to a research group on cosmic rays. One of his doctoral students there, Vanna Tongiorgi, became his wife in 1945 (their first joint publication, however, took place in 1939). In 1942 he became a professor at the University of Catania and at the same time carried out work on infrared detection for the Italian Air Force. Even after the war he taught in Catania.

In 1947 he was invited by Hans Bethe to Cornell University . In experiments at Echo Lake in the Rocky Mountains , Cocconi and his wife proved the galactic and even extra-galactic origin of cosmic rays. In Cornell, Cocconi also began to be interested in the proof of extraterrestrial intelligence in collaboration with Philip Morrison . They advocated a search on the 21 cm radio wavelength of neutral hydrogen with radio telescopes, which was later pursued in the SETI program.

From 1959 to 1961 he was involved at CERN in the early phases of the proton synchrotron there (in operation from 1959) and used it to investigate the behavior of the cross sections, e.g. B. in proton-proton scattering or proton-nucleus scattering. 1962-1963 he experimented in similar experiments at the proton synchrotron of the Brookhaven National Laboratory . In 1963 he was back at CERN, where he and Alan Whetherell, Bert Diddens and others discovered a phenomenon in the high-energy behavior of proton-proton scattering, which was interpreted as an exchange of two Regge poles, the so-called " Pomeron ", which had been predicted by Pomerantschuk . From 1967 to 1969 he was research director at CERN. There he developed a particle detector, which he called the “Roman Pot” and with which he detected the increase in the proton-proton cross-sections at high energies at the Intersecting Storage Rings (ISR) of CERN. In the 1970s he and Klaus Winter led the Charm Collaboration at CERN, which investigated electron-neutrino scattering. In 1979 he retired from CERN, but continued to attend CERN regularly.

In 1955 he was a Guggenheim Fellow. As for his attitude towards prizes and academies, the CERN obituary said: His refusal of association with academies, and his lack of interest in prizes and honors, as well as his wish not to talk publicly, after his retirement, of his scientific life , are well known .

Web links

References

  1. ^ To which Gilberto Bernardini also belonged, who later became the first research director at CERN
  2. ↑ Cyclotrons were just being developed at the time, first in Berkeley by Ernest Lawrence around 1932
  3. ↑ Cocconi, Morrison “Searching for interstellar communication”, Nature 1959, written when both were at CERN
  4. ↑ Charm for CERN-Hamburg-Amsterdam-Rome
  5. ↑ CERN Bulletin, November 2008, Vol. 49/50
personal data
SURNAME Cocconi, Giuseppe
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Italian physicist
DATE OF BIRTH 1914
PLACE OF BIRTH Como
DATE OF DEATH November 9, 2008