Angela Bracco (born 1955) is an Italian experimental nuclear physics whose research has applied gamma spectroscopy to the study of nuclear structure. [1] She is a professor of physics at the University of Milan, [2] the president of the Italian Physical Society, and the president of the Centro Ricerche Enrico Fermi , a physics museum and research center in Rome. [1]
Bracco was born in 1955 in Lecco. She earned a laurea (then the equivalent of a master's degree) in 1979 from the University of Milan, and completed a Ph.D. in 1983 in Canada, through a joint program of the TRIUMF national particle accelerator center in Vancouver and the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg. [3]
She returned to the University of Milan as an assistant professor in 1983. She was promoted to associate professor in 1988 and full professor in 2002. [3] She became president of the Italian Physical Society in 2000, [1] and president of the Centro Ricerche Enrico Fermi in 2024. [4]
Bracco is a coauthor of the book Giant Resonances: Nuclear Structure at Finite Temperature (with P.F. Bortigan and R.A. Brogila, Harwood Academic Publishers 1998 and Routledge 2019), on the topic of giant resonances.
Bracco was named to the Academia Europaea in 2016. [5] She was elected as a Fellow of the American Physical Society (APS) in 2024, after a nomination from the APS Forum on International Physics, "for outstanding experimental research in the field of nuclear physics, and for remarkable leadership in organising, managing, and advancing physics on an international dimension". [6] She is also a member of the Istituto Lombardo Accademia di Scienze e Lettere and of the Academy of Sciences of the Institute of Bologna. [1]
Enrico Fermi was an Italian and naturalized American physicist, renowned for being the creator of the world's first artificial nuclear reactor, the Chicago Pile-1, and a member of the Manhattan Project. He has been called the "architect of the nuclear age" and the "architect of the atomic bomb". He was one of very few physicists to excel in both theoretical physics and experimental physics. Fermi was awarded the 1938 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on induced radioactivity by neutron bombardment and for the discovery of transuranium elements. With his colleagues, Fermi filed several patents related to the use of nuclear power, all of which were taken over by the US government. He made significant contributions to the development of statistical mechanics, quantum theory, and nuclear and particle physics.
Maria Goeppert Mayer was a German-American theoretical physicist and Nobel laureate in Physics for proposing the nuclear shell model of the atomic nucleus. She was the second woman to win a Nobel Prize in physics, the first being Marie Curie. In 1986, the Maria Goeppert-Mayer Award for early-career women physicists was established in her honor.
Orso Mario Corbino was an Italian physicist and politician. He is noted for his studies of the influence of external magnetic fields on the motion of electrons in metals and he discovered the Corbino effect. He served as Minister for education in 1921–1922 and as Minister for National Economy in 1923–1924. He also served as professor of the University of Messina (1905) and of the University of Rome (1908). He was also the supervisor of the Via Panisperna boys.
Antonino Zichichi is an Italian physicist who has worked in the field of nuclear physics. He has served as President of the World Federation of Scientists and as a professor at the University of Bologna.
Edoardo Amaldi was an Italian physicist. He coined the term "neutrino" in conversations with Enrico Fermi distinguishing it from the heavier "neutron". He has been described as "one of the leading nuclear physicists of the twentieth century." He was involved in the anti-nuclear peace movement.
Giorgio Parisi is an Italian theoretical physicist, whose research has focused on quantum field theory, statistical mechanics and complex systems. His best known contributions are the QCD evolution equations for parton densities, obtained with Guido Altarelli, known as the Altarelli–Parisi or DGLAP equations, the exact solution of the Sherrington–Kirkpatrick model of spin glasses, the Kardar–Parisi–Zhang equation describing dynamic scaling of growing interfaces, and the study of whirling flocks of birds. He was awarded the 2021 Nobel Prize in Physics jointly with Klaus Hasselmann and Syukuro Manabe for groundbreaking contributions to theory of complex systems, in particular "for the discovery of the interplay of disorder and fluctuations in physical systems from atomic to planetary scales".
Francis Goddard Slack was an American physicist. He was a physics teacher, researcher, and administrator in academia who was renowned for placing equal emphasis on teaching and on research.
Herbert Lawrence Anderson was an American nuclear physicist who was Professor of Physics at the University of Chicago.
G. Norris Glasoe was an American nuclear physicist. He was a member of the Columbia University team which was the first in the United States to verify the European discovery of the nuclear fission of uranium via neutron bombardment. During World War II, he worked at the MIT Radiation Laboratory. He was a physicist and administrator at the Brookhaven National Laboratory.
Luciano Pietronero is an Italian physicist and full professor at the department of Physics at the Sapienza University of Rome. He is also Director of the Institute of Complex Systems of the National Research Council.
Ignazio Ciufolini is an Italian physicist active in the field of gravitational physics and general relativity.
Paolo Giubellino is an experimental particle physicist working on High-Energy Nuclear Collisions. Currently he is the joint Scientific Managing Director of the Facility for Antiproton and Ion Research (FAIR) and the GSI Helmholtz Centre for Heavy Ion Research (GSI) and Professor at the Institute of Nuclear Physics of the Technische Universität Darmstadt.
Giulio Casati is Emeritus Professor of Theoretical Physics at University of Insubria. Casati is known for his work on chaos, both classical and quantum, being considered one of the pioneers of the latter. Casati is in fact principally known for the discovery of quantum dynamical localization phenomenon, that highlighted the relevance of chaos in quantum mechanics. His landmark paper, with Boris Chirikov, Joseph Ford and Felix Izrailev, is among the most quoted in the field. With Boris Chirikov, Italo Guarneri and Dima Shepelyansky Casati also discovered that quantum localization deeply affects the excitation of hydrogen atom in strong monochromatic fields. Further major contributions considered the connections between quantization of non integrable systems and the statistical theory of spectra. With the advent of quantum computing Casati and his coworkers studied the efficient quantum computing of complex dynamics. On the classical side, Casati's interests regarded mostly energy conduction in non-linear lattices: from the earliest numerical proof of the validity of Fourier law in one-dimensional many body systems, obtained in collaboration with Bill Wisscher, Franco Vivaldi, and Joseph Ford, to the description of a thermal rectifier and of a thermal transistor. The same techniques lead to the theoretical demonstration of a one-way mirror for light
Claudio Pellegrini is an Italian/American physics and emeritus professor at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), known for his pioneering work on X-ray free electron lasers and collective effects in relativistic particle beams.
Luisa Cifarelli FInstP is a Professor of Experimental Particle Physics at the University of Bologna. She is the Director of the La Rivista del Nuovo Cimento.
The Milan school of physics indicates the tradition of research in the field of physics in Milan, with particular reference to the first and second half of the 20th century, when under the impulse of Orso Mario Corbino and Antonio Garbasso, and with the chair of theoretical physics by Aldo Pontremoli, the so-called Institute of Complementary Physics of Milan was formed at the University of Milan.
Wim van Saarloos is a Dutch physicist, academic and researcher. He is a Professor of Theoretical Physics at Leiden University
Sarah C. Eno is an American experimental particle physicist at the University of Maryland, College Park, where she is a professor of physics and UMD Distinguished Scholar–Teacher. She has participated in several large experimental collaborations in high-energy physics, including the AMY experiment at the Japanese TRISTAN particle accelerator, the DØ experiment at Fermilab in the US, the Collider Detector at Fermilab, and the Compact Muon Solenoid experiment at the Large Hadron Collider in France and Switzerland.
Carla Fröhlich is a Swiss and American nuclear astrophysicist whose research has included the neutrino p-process for nucleosynthesis in supernovae, and the study of multi-messenger astronomy. She is a professor of physics and University Faculty Scholar at North Carolina State University.
Nadia Robotti is an Italian historian of physics specializing in Italian physics from the mid-19th century to the mid-20th century, including the works of Enrico Fermi, Ettore Majorana, and Bruno Pontecorvo. She is a professor of physics at the University of Genoa and an external project leader at the Museo storico della fisica e Centro di studi e ricerche "Enrico Fermi".