Emilio Gino Segrč, the son of a
paper mill owner, was born February 1, 1905 and raised in
Tivoli, Italy. A move to Rome and entrance at the University of
Rome brought Segrč into contact with Enrico Fermi, one of the
greatest physicists in history. Segrč became the first person to
earn a Ph.D. under Fermi's sponsorship (in 1928) and worked with
Fermi in applying the newly discovered quantum mechanics to
atomic and molecular phenomena. When Fermi became interested in
nuclear physics and carried out his epoch-making research on the
production of artificial radioactivity by neutron absorption,
Segrč was by his side. He was a co-author, with Fermi and
others, of a series of papers published in 1934 and following
years which are among the most important of our time, initiating
(on the basis of discoveries by others) the field of neutron
physics and laying the groundwork for the later development of
atomic energy.
In 1935, Segrč
was named professor of physics and chairman of the department at
the University of Palermo, on the island of Sicily, where he
continued his interest in nuclear physics. While on an extended
visit to the Berkeley campus in 1936, he noted that certain
parts of the internal structure of the cyclotron received a very
strong deuteron bombardment when the machine was operating; he
asked if he could have these parts when the cyclotron was
rebuilt. They were sent to him at Palermo, and in one of them he
and C. Perrier indentified a new element, the first man-made
element (Segrč named it "Technetium," from the Greek word for
"artificial").
Two years after
his fruitful visit to Berkeley, troubles with the Fascist regime
forced Segrč to flee the land of his birth. He joined the staff
of the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory, where he entered a period
of great activity. When fission was discovered, followed by the
discovery of neptunium and plutonium, he set out to answer a key
question for the future of atomic energy; is plutonium
fissionable by slow neutrons? It was, and when the Los Alamos
Laboratory of the Manhattan Project was established, Segrč went
there as a leading member of the scientific staff, carrying out
important studies of the fission process.
After the war,
Segrč (by now a United States citizen) returned to Berkeley as a
professor in the Department of Physics. Perhaps his crowning
achievement was the discovery , with Owen Chamberlain, of
anti-proton, in 1955. The Chamberlain-Segrč team detected the
anti-protons by designing a maze through which only ant-protons
could pass. "We had to sort them out and weigh them within much
less than one-Millionth of a second," Segrč later recalled. "If
we had wanted to have them for a longer time, we would have had
to dig a tunnel in the Berkeley hills to run after them."
While near the
goal in the fall of 1955, Segrč and Chamberlain kept the World
Series scores and the number of anti-protons they found on the
same blackboard. Four years later, the World Series would be
forgotten, but the other marks were remembered by the committee
that awards the Nobel Prize. In 1959, Segrč and Chamberlain
shared the Nobel Prize in Physics for their discovery of the
anti-proton. Professor Segrč retired from the Berkeley campus in
1972.
__________
Schoch,
Russell. "Emilio Segrč: Physics, 1959." The Nobel
Tradition in Berkeley:
University of California, Berkeley. UC Berkeley
Development Office: UC Press,
1984, p. 18.
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