Emilio Segrè, Date of Birth, Place of Birth, Date of Death

    

Emilio Segrè

Italian physicist and Nobel laureate

Date of Birth: 01-Feb-1905

Place of Birth: Tivoli, Lazio, Italy

Date of Death: 22-Apr-1989

Profession: physicist, university teacher, nuclear physicist

Nationality: United States, Italy

Zodiac Sign: Aquarius


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About Emilio Segrè

  • Emilio Gino Segrè (1 February 1905 – 22 April 1989) was an Italian-American physicist and Nobel laureate, who discovered the elements technetium and astatine, and the antiproton, a subatomic antiparticle, for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1959. From 1943 to 1946 he worked at the Los Alamos National Laboratory as a group leader for the Manhattan Project.
  • He found in April 1944 that Thin Man, the proposed plutonium gun-type nuclear weapon, would not work because of the presence of plutonium-240 impurities. Born in Tivoli, near Rome, Segrè studied engineering at the University of Rome La Sapienza before taking up physics in 1927.
  • Segrè was appointed assistant professor of physics at the University of Rome in 1932 and worked there until 1936, becoming one of the Via Panisperna boys.
  • From 1936 to 1938 he was director of the Physics Laboratory at the University of Palermo.
  • After a visit to Ernest O.
  • Lawrence's Berkeley Radiation Laboratory, he was sent a molybdenum strip from the laboratory's cyclotron deflector in 1937, which was emitting anomalous forms of radioactivity.
  • After careful chemical and theoretical analysis, Segrè was able to prove that some of the radiation was being produced by a previously unknown element, named technetium, which was the first artificially synthesized chemical element that does not occur in nature. In 1938, Benito Mussolini's fascist government passed anti-Semitic laws barring Jews from university positions.
  • As a Jew, Segrè was now rendered an indefinite émigré.
  • At the Berkeley Radiation Lab, Lawrence offered him a job as a research assistant.
  • While at Berkeley, Segrè helped discover the element astatine and the isotope plutonium-239, which was later used to make the Fat Man nuclear bomb dropped on Nagasaki.
  • In 1944, he became a naturalized citizen of the United States.
  • On his return to Berkeley in 1946, he became a professor of physics and of history of science, serving until 1972.
  • Segrè and Owen Chamberlain were co-heads of a research group at the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory that discovered the antiproton, for which the two shared the 1959 Nobel Prize in Physics. Segrè was also active as a photographer and took many photographs documenting events and people in the history of modern science, which were donated to the American Institute of Physics after his death.
  • The American Institute of Physics named its photographic archive of physics history in his honor.

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