Giuseppe Occhialini

Giuseppe Paolo Stanislao Occhialini , called Beppo , (born December 5, 1907 in Fossombrone , † December 30, 1993 in Paris ) was an Italian physicist .

He was the son of the physicist Raffaele Augusto Occhialini (1878-1951, professor in Genoa) and studied at the University of Florence , where he graduated in 1929 and then continued research. At that time he was working (partly with Bruno Rossi ) on the development of particle detectors, for example cloud chambers. From 1931 he worked at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge , where he worked with Patrick Blackett . He triggered a cloud chamber through a coincidence circuit so that it only took pictures when a particle passed through, which greatly increased its efficiency. Blackett was able to make observations at the positron (although he was beaten by Carl D. Anderson by a few months when it was discovered ). In 1934 he returned to Italy, but soon after went to Brazil because of the political uncertainty. From 1937 to 1944 he was at the University of São Paulo , where he founded a school of physicists, and he also spent a year at the biophysics laboratory in Rio de Janeiro with Carlos Chagas Filho . In 1944 he went to Great Britain, where he wanted to contribute to the war effort in research, but was turned down to his surprise. There he began a collaboration with Cecil Powell in Bristol. Powell had introduced photographic emulsions there as particle detectors - a method that Occhialini refined. He also successfully tested the detectors on the Pic du Midi in the Pyrenees (Occhialini was a passionate mountaineer). In 1948 he went to the Free University of Brussels and returned to Italy in 1950, where he taught in Genoa (he received the professorship there through the influence of his father) and from 1952 at the University of Milan . In his early days in Milan he still worked temporarily in Brussels and was also commissioned by UNESCO to set up physical research in Brazil, where he founded a group to study cosmic radiation in the Andes. In 1974 he resigned from the management of his institute in Milan.

Together with Cecil Frank Powell , who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1950 , and his Brazilian student César Lattes , he discovered the pi-meson in 1947 at the H. H. Wills Physical Laboratory in Bristol . He continued the investigation of particles of cosmic radiation and his research in high-energy physics, when this shifted increasingly to particle accelerators in the 1950s. In particular, he and his group in Milan took part in research at CERN , founded in 1954 . He later dealt with gamma-ray astronomy (where he initially worked again with Bruno Rossi) and was involved in the establishment of ESA (in 1963 as ESRO ). His institute in Milan played a leading role in the COS-B gamma-ray satellite .

Occhialini received the Antonio Feltrinelli Prize in 1956 and the Wolf Prize for Physics in 1979 . In 1949 he received the national prize from the President of the Republic of Italy. He was a member of the Accademia dei Lincei since 1950, a Fellow of the Royal Society since 1974 and a member of the National Academy of Sciences since 1978 . In 1975 he was admitted to the American Philosophical Society .

The X-ray satellite BeppoSAX has the suffix Beppo from the nickname of Occhialini. He had initiated the development of the satellite together with Rossi. The asteroid (20081) Occhialini is named after him.

He was married to the physicist Constance Dilworth (1924-2004), who was also a professor in Milan.

The Occhialini Medal of the Institute of Physics and the Italian Physical Society is named after him.

Web links

• Obituary by Bignami Biogr. Memoirs Fellows, Royal Society, 2002, PDF.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ CMG Lattes, GPS Occhialini, CF Powell: A determination of the ratio of the masses of pi-meson and mu-meson by the method of grain-counting. Proceedings of the Physical Society, 61 (1948), pp. 173-183.
2. ^ CMG Lattes, H. Muirhead, GPS Occhialini, CF Powell: Processes involving charged mesons. Nature 159 (1947), pp. 694-697.
3. ^ Member History: Giuseppe Occhialini. American Philosophical Society, accessed November 1, 2018 . 
4. ^ The Occhialini medal and prize.