Editorial
Dear Readers,
There has been plenty of breaking news in physics this month; from the Nobel Prize awarded to our American colleagues, Saul Perlmutter, Brian P. Schmidt and Adam G. Riess, for their discovery of the accelerating expansion of the Universe; to the intriguing results, obtained in Europe, on the velocity of muon-neutrinos.
The neutrino velocity has been measured with unprecedented precision in the OPERA experiment, at the Gran Sasso Laboratory of the INFN1 in Italy, using the CNGS neutrino beam produced at CERN, in Geneva. The measurements indicate that these high-energy neutrinos, passing through 730 km of the Earth’s crust, are travelling faster than light. This amazing result – if confirmed – will have extreme consequences for physics. This is why this has already attracted the attention of physicists, from all research fields, the world over.
The existence of the Gran Sasso Laboratory, the largest underground lab in the world, the design of the layout of its huge experimental halls pointing towards CERN, and moreover the idea of the neutrino beam from CERN to Gran Sasso to study the phenomenon of neutrino oscillations, are all due to the vision of Antonino Zichichi in 1979, at which time he was President of both the INFN and the EPS.
The figure below is a handmade original sketch from Zichichi’s presentation to the Commission on Public Works of the Italian Senate in a session organized by the Senate’s President to discuss the proposed Gran Sasso project in 1979.
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Image Credit: SIF |
For more information, see the volume ‘Thirty Years of Gran Sasso’2.
Luisa Cifarelli
EPS President
