CPH Theory

Welcome to CPH

E-Journal

به نشریه الکترونیکی سی. پی. اچ.

خوش آمدید

Nobel 1959

English Farsi Home Contact us News English Articles Seminars

English Articles page has been updated

Properties of Antinucleons

The Early Antiproton Work

"for their discovery of the antiproton"

Emilio Gino Segrè	Owen Chamberlain

1/2 of the prize	1/2 of the prize
USA	USA
University of California Berkeley, CA, USA	University of California Berkeley, CA, USA
b. 1905 (in Tivoli, Italy) d. 1989	b. 1920 d. 2006

Biography: Emilio Gino Segrè

Emilio Segrè was born in Tivoli, Rome, on February 1st, 1905, as the son of Giuseppe Segrè, industrialist, and Amelia Treves. He went to school in Tivoli and Rome, and entered the University of Rome as a student of engineering in 1922. In 1927 he changed over to physics and took his doctor's degree in 1928 under Professor Enrico Fermi, the first one tmder the latter's sponsorship.

He served in the Italian Army in 1928 and 1929, and entered the University of Rome as assistant to Professor Corbino in 1929. In 1930 he had a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship and worked with Professor Otto Stern at Hamburg, Germany, and Professor Pieter Zeeman at Amsterdam, Holland. In 1932 he returned to Italy and was appointed Assistant Professor at the University of Rome, working continuously with Professor Fermi and others. In 1936 he was appointed Director of the Physics Laboratory at the University of Palermo, where he remained until I938.

In 1938 Professor Segrè came to Berkeley, California, first as a research associate in the Radiation Laboratory and later as a lecturer in the Physics Department. From 1943 to 1946 he was a group leader in the Los Alamos Laboratory of the Manhattan Project. In 1946 he returned to the University of California at Berkeley as a Professor of Physics, and still occupies that position.

The work of Professor Segrè has been mainly in atomic and nuclear physics. In the first field he worked in atomic spectroscopy, making contributions to the spectroscopy of forbidden lines and the study of the Zeeman effect. Except for a short interlude on molecular beams, all his work until 1934 was in atomic spectroscopy. In 1934 he started the work in nuclear physics by collaborating with Professor Fermi on neutron research. He participated in the discovery of slow neutrons and in the pioneer neutron work carried on in Rome 1934-1935. Later he was interested in radiochemistry and discovered together with Professor Perrier the element technetium, together with Corson and Mackenzie the element astatine, and together with Kennedy, Seaborg, and Wahl, plutonium-239 and its fission properties.

His other investigations in nuclear physics cover many subjects, e.g., isomerism, spontaneous fission, and lately high-energy physics. Here he, his associates and students have made contributions to the study of the interaction between nucleons and on the related polarization phenomena. In 1955 together with Chamberlain, Wiegand, and Ypsilantis he discovered the antiproton. The study of antinucleons is now his major subject of research.

Professor Segrè has taught in temporary appointments at Columbia University, New York, at the University of Illinois, at the University of Rio de Janeiro and in several other institutions. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences (U.S.A), of the Academy of Sciences at Heidelberg (Germany), of the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei of Italy, and of other learned societies. He has received the Hofmann Medal of the German Chemical Society and the Cannizzaro Medal of the Italian Accademia dei Lincei. He is an Honorary Professor of San Marcos University in Peru and has an honorary doctor's degree of the University of Palermo, Italy.

Professor Segrè is married to Elfriede Spiro; they have a son, Claudio, and two daughters, Amelia and Fausta.

Biography: Owen Chamberlain

Owen Chamberlain was born in San Francisco on July 10, 1920. His father was W. Edward Chamberlain, a prominent radiologist with an interest in physics. His mother's maiden name was Genevieve Lucinda Owen.

He obtained his bachelor's degree at Dartmouth College in 1941. He entered graduate school in physics at the University of California, but his studies were interrupted by the involvement of the United States in World War II. In early 1942 he joined the Manhattan Project, the U.S. Government organization for the construction of the atomic bomb. Within the Manhattan Project he worked under Professor Emilio Segrè, both in Berkeley, California, and in Los Alamos, New Mexico, investigating nuclear cross sections for intermediate-energy neutrons and the spontaneous fission of heavy elements. In 1946 he resumed graduate work at the University of Chicago where, under the inspired guidance of the late Professor Enrico Fermi, he worked toward his doctorate. He completed experimental work on the diffraction of slow neutrons in liquids in 1948 and his doctor's degree was awarded in 1949 by the University of Chicago.

In 1948 he accepted a teaching position at the University of California in Berkeley. His research work includes extensive studies of proton-proton scattering, undertaken with Professor Segrè and Dr. Clyde Wiegand, and an important series of experiments on polarization effects in proton scattering, culminating in the triple-scattering experiments with Professor Segrè, Dr. Wiegand, Dr. Thomas Ypsilantis, and Dr. Robert D. Tripp. In 1955 he participated with Dr. Wiegand, Professor Segrè, and Dr. Ypsilantis in the discovery of the antiproton.

For the next few years he and his colleagues studied the interactions of antiprotons with hydrogen, deuterium and other elements, and used antiprotons to produce antineutrons. In 1960 he, together with Professors Carson Jeffries and Gilbert Shapiro, pioneered the development and use of polarized proton targets to study the spin dependence of a wide variety of high energy processes, including the scattering of pi-mesons and protons on polarized protons, the determination of the parity of hyperons, and a test of time reversal symmetry in electron-proton scattering. These and other similar experiments were his main activity for the next 20 years. In the late '70s and early '80s he briefly participated in the study of the interactions of energetic light nuclei with nuclear targets at the Berkeley Bevalac accelerator. In the final years before retiring from active service he worked with Dr. David Nygren on the development and construction of the Time-Projection-Chamber that was subsequently used with great success to study high-energy positron-electron interactions at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center.

He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and a member of the National Academy of Sciences. He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1957 for the purpose of doing studies in the physics of antinucleons at the University of Rome. He was appointed Professor of Physics at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1958, and served as Loeb Lecturer at Harvard University in 1959.

In 1943 he married Beatrice Babette Copper (dec. 1988). They had three daughters and one son. Subsequent marriages to June Steingart Greenfield (dec. 1991) and currently to Senta Pugh Gaiser.

Nobel Lecture: Emilio Gino Segrè

Properties of Antinucleons

download 350 kb