Enrico Fermi was an Italian and naturalized American physicist, renowned for being the creator of the world's first 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.
Particle physics or high-energy physics is the study of fundamental particles and forces that constitute matter and radiation. The field also studies combinations of elementary particles up to the scale of protons and neutrons, while the study of combination of protons and neutrons is called nuclear physics.
In quantum mechanics, the Pauli exclusion principle states that two or more identical particles with half-integer spins cannot simultaneously occupy the same quantum state within a system that obeys the laws of quantum mechanics. This principle was formulated by Austrian physicist Wolfgang Pauli in 1925 for electrons, and later extended to all fermions with his spin–statistics theorem of 1940.
Degenerate matter occurs when the Pauli exclusion principle significantly alters a state of matter at low temperature. The term is used in astrophysics to refer to dense stellar objects such as white dwarfs and neutron stars, where thermal pressure alone is not enough to avoid gravitational collapse. The term also applies to metals in the Fermi gas approximation.
The International School for Advanced Studies is an international, state-supported, post-graduate-education and research institute in Trieste, Italy.
Although there are nine known isotopes of helium (2He), only helium-3 and helium-4 are stable. All radioisotopes are short-lived, the longest-lived being 6
He
with a half-life of 806.92(24) milliseconds. The least stable is 10
He
, with a half-life of 260(40) yoctoseconds, although it is possible that 2
He
may have an even shorter half-life.
Jeffrey Goldstone is a British theoretical physicist and an emeritus physics faculty member at the MIT Center for Theoretical Physics.
The Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP) is a research center for physical and mathematical sciences, located in Trieste, Friuli-Venezia Giulia, Italy.
Arkady Beynusovich (Benediktovich) Migdal was a Soviet physicist and member of the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union. He developed the formula that accounts for the Landau–Pomeranchuk–Migdal effect, a reduction of the bremsstrahlung and pair production cross sections at high energies or high matter densities.
Understanding the structure of the atomic nucleus is one of the central challenges in nuclear physics.
Reinhard Oehme was a German-American physicist known for the discovery of C non-conservation in the presence of P (parity) violation, the formulation and proof of hadron dispersion relations, the "Edge of the Wedge Theorem" in the function theory of several complex variables, the Goldberger-Miyazawa-Oehme sum rule, reduction of quantum field theories, Oehme-Zimmermann superconvergence relations for gauge field correlation functions, and many other contributions.
The atomic nucleus is the small, dense region consisting of protons and neutrons at the center of an atom, discovered in 1911 by Ernest Rutherford based on the 1909 Geiger–Marsden gold foil experiment. After the discovery of the neutron in 1932, models for a nucleus composed of protons and neutrons were quickly developed by Dmitri Ivanenko and Werner Heisenberg. An atom is composed of a positively charged nucleus, with a cloud of negatively charged electrons surrounding it, bound together by electrostatic force. Almost all of the mass of an atom is located in the nucleus, with a very small contribution from the electron cloud. Protons and neutrons are bound together to form a nucleus by the nuclear force.
Francesco Iachello is an Italian nuclear engineer and theoretical physicist, who works mainly on nuclear and molecular physics. He and his collaborator Akito Arima are the creators of the "interacting boson model".
The idea that matter consists of smaller particles and that there exists a limited number of sorts of primary, smallest particles in nature has existed in natural philosophy at least since the 6th century BC. Such ideas gained physical credibility beginning in the 19th century, but the concept of "elementary particle" underwent some changes in its meaning: notably, modern physics no longer deems elementary particles indestructible. Even elementary particles can decay or collide destructively; they can cease to exist and create (other) particles in result.
Asoke Nath Mitra was an Indian theoretical physicist. He was a lifetime professor emeritus at Delhi University. He is known for his work in nuclear physics, particle physics and quantum field theory and in particular, for his fundamental contributions in obtaining the exact solution of the nucleon 3- body problem with separable potentials which led to the few nucleon studies, quark-recoil effect, development of an integrated dynamics of 2- and 3- body systems from nucleons to quarks as well as for the development of quark dynamics and relativistic quark models for hadrons in the Bethe-Salpeter framework. He was awarded the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize in 1969.
Ramamurti Rajaraman is an emeritus professor of theoretical physics at the School of Physical Sciences at Jawaharlal Nehru University. He was also the co-Chairman of the International Panel on Fissile Materials and a member of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists' Science and Security Board. He has taught and conducted research in physics at the Indian Institute of Science, the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, and as a visiting professor at Stanford, Harvard, MIT, and elsewhere. He received his doctorate in theoretical physics in 1963 from Cornell University. In addition to his physics publications, Rajaraman has written widely on topics including fissile material production in India and Pakistan and the radiological effects of nuclear weapon accidents.
Erio Tosatti is an Italian theoretical physicist active at the International School for Advanced Studies (SISSA), and at the Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP), both in Trieste, Italy. He is a broad-scope theorist who carried out research on a wide range of condensed matter physics phenomena. His early work dealt with optical properties, electron energy loss, theory of excitons and nonlocal dielectric response in solids, including layer crystals such as graphite and semiconductors; charge- and spin-density-waves; surface physics in all its aspects, particularly reconstruction, roughening and melting, also in clusters; the prediction the Berry phase in fullerene; the first calculated STM map of graphite, now a standard in the field; matter at extreme pressures: carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, CO2, iron at earth core conditions, water and ammonia at deep planetary conditions, pressure-induced insulator-metal transitions in layer compounds like MoS2. In nanophysics, he and his group predicted helical structures of metal nanowires; the spontaneous magnetism of metal nanocontacts, including the electronic circumstances for normal or ferromagnetic Kondo effect therein. His and his collaborator's theory of strongly correlated superconductivity was recently confirmed in compounds such as Cs3C60. Pioneering papers on quantum annealing are now basic to current developments in quantum computing. More recently he moved on to the theory of nanofriction, a field where he obtained the ERC Advanced Grant MODPHYSFRICT 2013–2019, and subsequently, as co-PI with an experimental group, another ERC Advanced Grant ULTRADISS 2019-2024. More details of his current and past research activity can be found here.
John William Negele is an American theoretical nuclear physicist.
The I. I. Rabi Prize in Atomic, Molecular, and Optical Physics is given by the American Physical Society to recognize outstanding work by mid-career researchers in the field of atomic, molecular, and optical physics. The award was endowed in 1989 in honor of the physicist I. I. Rabi and has been awarded biannually since 1991.
