Segrè, Emilio

▪ Italian-American physicist

in full  Emilio Gino Segrè 

born Feb. 1, 1905, Tivoli, Italy

died April 22, 1989, Lafayette, Calif., U.S.

 Italian-born American physicist who was cowinner, with Owen Chamberlain (Chamberlain, Owen) of the United States, of the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1959 for the discovery of the antiproton, an antiparticle having the same mass as a proton but opposite in electrical charge.

      Segrè initially began studies in engineering at the University of Rome in 1922 but later studied under Enrico Fermi (Fermi, Enrico) and received his doctorate in physics in 1928. In 1932 Segrè was appointed assistant professor of physics at the University of Rome, and two years later he participated in neutron experiments directed by Fermi, in which many elements, including uranium, were bombarded with neutrons, and elements heavier than uranium were created. In 1935 they discovered slow neutrons, which have properties important to the operation of nuclear reactors.

      Segrè left Rome in 1936 to become director of the physics laboratory at the University of Palermo. One year later he discovered technetium, the first man-made element not found in nature. While visiting California in 1938, Segrè was dismissed from the University of Palermo by the Fascist government, so he remained in the United States as a research associate at the University of California, Berkeley. Continuing his research, he and his associates discovered the element astatine in 1940, and later, with another group, he discovered the isotope plutonium-239, which he found to be fissionable, much like uranium-235. Plutonium-239 was used in the first atomic bomb and in the bomb dropped on Nagasaki.

      From 1943 to 1946 Segrè was a group leader at the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory, Los Alamos, N.M. He was naturalized as a U.S. citizen in 1944 and was professor of physics at Berkeley (1946–72). In 1955, using the new bevatron particle accelerator, Segrè and Chamberlain produced and identified antiprotons and thus set the stage for the discovery of many additional antiparticles. He was appointed professor of nuclear physics at the University of Rome in 1974. He wrote several books, including Experimental Nuclear Physics (1953), Nuclei and Particles (1964), Enrico Fermi: Physicist (1970), and two books on the history of physics, From X-rays to Quarks: Modern Physicists and Their Discoveries (1980) and From Falling Bodies to Radio Waves (1984). Shortly after winning the Nobel Prize, Segrè wrote the entry on the proton for the 1960 printing of the 14th edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica. (See the Britannica Classic: .)

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