1. The prestigious Pontecorvo Prize was instituted in his memory in 1995.
45 Facts About Bruno Pontecorvo
1. 2.
The fourth of eight children of a wealthy Jewish-Italian family, Bruno Pontecorvo studied physics at the Sapienza University, under Fermi, becoming the youngest of his Via Panisperna boys.
3.
Bruno Pontecorvo moved to Paris in 1936, where he conducted research under Irene and Frederic Joliot-Curie.
4.
Bruno Pontecorvo eventually made his way to Tulsa, Oklahoma, where he applied his knowledge of nuclear physics to prospecting for oil and minerals.
5.
Bruno Pontecorvo looked into cosmic rays, the decay of muons, and what would become his specialty, neutrinos.
6.
Bruno Pontecorvo moved to Britain in 1949, where he worked for the Atomic Energy Research Establishment at Harwell.
7.
Bruno Pontecorvo predicted in 1958 that supernovae would produce intense bursts of neutrinos, which was confirmed in 1987 when Supernova SN1987A was detected by neutrino detectors.
8.
Bruno Pontecorvo was born on 22 August 1913 in Marina di Pisa, the fourth of eight children of Massimo Bruno Pontecorvo and his wife Maria.
9.
Bruno Pontecorvo's older brother Guido, who was born in 1907, became a geneticist.
10.
Bruno Pontecorvo's younger brother Gillo was born in 1919, and is best known as the director of The Battle of Algiers.
11.
Bruno Pontecorvo had two younger sisters; Laura, who was born in 1921, and Anna, who was born in 1924, and a younger brother Giovanni, who was born in 1926.
12.
Bruno Pontecorvo's family was a wealthy family; Massimo owned three textile factories employing over 1,000 people.
13.
Bruno Pontecorvo's grandfather on the maternal side, Arrigo Maroni, born in Mantua, was director of the Fatebenefratelli Hospital in Milan; his mother's cousin was a notable zoologist Elisa Gurrieri-Norsa.
14.
Bruno Pontecorvo enterered the University of Pisa intending to study engineering, but after two years he decided to switch to physics in 1931.
15.
In 1934, Bruno Pontecorvo contributed to Fermi's famous experiment showing the properties of slow neutrons that led the way to the discovery of nuclear fission.
16.
Bruno Pontecorvo's name was included on the Via Panisperna boys' patent "To increase the production of artificial radioactivity with neutron bombardment".
17.
Bruno Pontecorvo was made a temporary assistant at the Royal Institute of Physics on 1 November 1934 and the University of Rome, and on 7 November, he was listed as co-author, along with Fermi and Rasetti, of a landmark paper on slow neutrons that reported that hydrogen slowed neutrons more than heavy elements, and that slow neutrons were more easily absorbed.
18.
In February 1936, Bruno Pontecorvo left Italy and moved to Paris to work in the laboratory of Irene and Frederic Joliot-Curie at the College de France on a one-year scholarship to study the effects of collisions of neutrons with protons and on the electromagnetic transitions among isomers.
19.
Bruno Pontecorvo formed a relationship with Helene Marianne Nordblom, a Swedish woman working in Paris as a nanny.
20.
Bruno Pontecorvo accompanied her, leaving Gil behind in a residential nursery in Paris.
21.
Bruno Pontecorvo was now unable to return to Italy because of the Fascist regime's racial laws against the Jews.
22.
Bruno Pontecorvo discovered that some isomers do not change into other elements on decaying radioactively.
23.
In June 1939, Bruno Pontecorvo applied for a visa to visit Sweden, but his application was rejected.
24.
Bruno Pontecorvo joined the French Communist Party the next day as an affirmation of his personal faith in the Soviet Union.
25.
In Tulsa, Bruno Pontecorvo went to work for two European migrants, Jakov "Jake" Neufeld and Serge Alexandrovich Scherbatskoy, who had founded a company called Well Surveys with funds provided by Standard Oil.
26.
Bruno Pontecorvo created a neutron source using radium and beryllium, as the Via Panisperna boys had, with paraffin wax as a neutron moderator, and measured the absorption of different minerals using methods developed by Fermi and Amaldi.
27.
Bruno Pontecorvo was unable to secure the supplies he wanted, but Fermi showed an unexpected keen interest in the Wells Surveys work.
28.
The meeting with Fermi yielded no supplies, but it did result in Bruno Pontecorvo receiving an offer from von Halban and Placzek to join the Tube Alloys team at the Montreal Laboratory in Canada.
29.
Bruno Pontecorvo was officially appointed to Tube Alloys on 15 January 1943, and arrived in Montreal with his family on 7 February 1943.
30.
Bruno Pontecorvo's second son was born on 20 March 1944, and was named Tito after the Yugoslavian communist leader.
31.
Bruno Pontecorvo wrote 25 papers related to reactor design, although only two were published.
32.
Bruno Pontecorvo did some prospecting with his old firm, searching for uranium deposits near Port Radium in the Northwest Territories.
33.
Physicists were in great demand after the war ended in August 1945, and Bruno Pontecorvo received attractive and lucrative offers from several universities in the United States.
34.
Bruno Pontecorvo acquired the nickname "Ramon Novarro" after the actor of that name following an adventure in which he made a trip to Boston with two women, which culminated in Marianne clearing out the bank account and departing for Banff with the children; but they were reconciled.
35.
Bruno Pontecorvo finally departed Chalk River for the United Kingdom on 24 January 1949.
36.
At Harwell, Bruno Pontecorvo continued to be involved in reactor design projects.
37.
On 1 September 1950, in the middle of a holiday in Italy, Bruno Pontecorvo abruptly flew from Rome to Stockholm with his wife and three sons without informing friends or relatives.
38.
Bruno Pontecorvo worked until his death in what is the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Dubna, concentrating entirely on theoretical studies of high energy particles and continuing his research on neutrinos and decay of muons.
39.
Bruno Pontecorvo was awarded the Lenin Prize in 1964 for his work on the weak interaction.
40.
Bruno Pontecorvo began a lifelong affair with Rodam Amiredzhibi, the wife of poet Mikhail Svetlov, in 1950.
41.
Bruno Pontecorvo was not permitted to leave the Soviet Union for many years; his first trip abroad being in 1978 when he travelled to Italy for celebrations of Amaldi's 70th birthday.
42.
The scientific work of Bruno Pontecorvo is full of formidable intuitions, some of which have represented milestones in modern physics.
43.
Bruno Pontecorvo predicted in 1958 that supernovae would produce intense bursts of neutrinos.
44.
Bruno Pontecorvo died in Dubna on 24 September 1993, afflicted by Parkinson's disease.
45.
In 1995, in recognition of his scientific merits, the prestigious Bruno Pontecorvo Prize has been instituted by the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research.