Emilio Segrè

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Emilio Segrè (1959)

Emilio Gino Segrè (born February 1, 1905 in Tivoli , Italy , † April 22, 1989 in Lafayette , California ) was an American physicist of Italian origin. Segrè succeeded in 1937 with the first undisputed proof of the element technetium . During the Second World War he worked on the Manhattan project to develop the atomic bomb in Los Alamos . In 1959 he and Owen Chamberlain received the Nobel Prize in Physics “for their discovery of the antiproton ”.

Life

Segre was born in Tivoli and enrolled at the University of La Sapienza in Rome for engineering one. In 1927 he switched to physics and completed his studies in 1928 with a doctorate under Enrico Fermi .

After serving in the army in 1928/29, he worked in 1930 with Otto Stern in Hamburg and Pieter Zeeman in Amsterdam as a Rockefeller scholarship holder . In 1932 he became assistant professor of physics in Rome and stayed there until 1936 when he became director of the physics laboratories at the University of Palermo (until 1938).

After visiting Ernest O. Lawrence in the radiation laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley in 1937, he received a molybdenum strip from the cyclotron deflector with unusual radioactive emissions. After chemical and theoretical analysis, Segrè and Carlo Perrier were able to show that it was an undiscovered chemical element that he named technetium . It was the first artificially created element that does not occur naturally.

During Segrès' summer stay in California in 1938, Mussolini's fascists in Italy passed anti-Semitic laws that excluded Jews from university positions. As a Jew, Segrè was forced to emigrate from Italy and stayed in the USA. Lawrence got him a job as an assistant in the Berkeley radiation laboratory for $ 300 a month, a very low position for the discoverer of a new element. Since Segrè was legally bound to California, Lawrence reduced his salary to $ 116. In parallel, Segrè found a job as a lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley. Berkeley Segrè was involved in the discovery of the element astatine and the plutonium - isotope 239 involved, which in the later atomic bomb , on Nagasaki was dropped, was used.

From 1943 to 1946 Segrè worked on the Manhattan project of the Los Alamos National Laboratory as a group leader. In 1944 he became a citizen of the United States . He returned to Berkeley as a physics professor in 1946, which he remained until 1972. In 1974 he accepted a professorship for nuclear physics in Rome.

Since he was an avid amateur photographer and portrayed many personalities in science, the photo archive of the American Institute of Physics was named after him.

Segrè died of a heart attack at the age of 84.

Memberships

In 1941 Segrè became a Fellow of the American Physical Society . In 1952 he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences and 1963 to the American Philosophical Society , in 1973 he was accepted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences .

Publications

  • The great physicists and their discoveries :
    • Volume 1: From falling bodies to electromagnetic waves ( From Falling Bodies to Radio Waves ). Piper, Munich 1986, ISBN 3-492-11174-2 (Original Freeman, San Francisco 1984),
    • Volume 2: From the X-rays to the quarks ( From X-Rays to Quarks ). Piper, Munich 1984 ISBN 3-492-02566-8 , (Original Freeman, San Francisco 1980).
  • A mind always in motion. University of California Press 1993 (autobiography, free online version ).
  • Nuclei and Particles. An introduction to nuclear and subnuclear physics. Benjamin 1964, 2nd edition 1977.
  • Enrico Fermi, physicist. University of Chicago Press 1970.
  • Ed .: Experimental nuclear physics. 3 volumes, Wiley 1953-1959.

literature

  • Claudio G. Segré: Atoms, bombs and eskimo kisses: a memoir of father and son. Viking, New York 1995.
  • Emilio Segrè , in: Internationales Biographisches Archiv 26/1989 from June 19, 1989, in the Munzinger archive ( beginning of article freely accessible).

Web links

Commons : Emilio Segrè  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Roberto Finzi : The Damage to Italian Culture: The Fate of Jewish University Professors in Fascist Italy and After, 1938-1946 ; published in: Joshua D. Zimmerman (Ed.): Jews in Italy under Fascist and Nazi Rule, 1922–1945 . Cambridge University Press 2005, ISBN 978-0-521-84101-6 , p. 98