The Fermi Prize 2015 in the International Year of Light

The 2015 Enrico Fermi Prize of the Italian Physical Society [SIF] has been awarded to Toshiki Tajima and Diederik Wiersma with the following citation:

“For their innovative and high-impact contributions to the study of phenomena dealing with the interaction of light with matter and particles“.

In particular:

– to Toshiki Tajima, University of California at Irvine, Irvine, CA, USA, “for the invention of the laser-wakefield-acceleration technique which led to a large number of fundamental and interdisciplinary applications ranging from accelerator science to plasma physics and astrophysics“;

– to Diederik Wiersma, University of Florence, Italy, and National Institute of Optics of the Italian National Research Council [INO-CNR] and European Laboratory for Non-Linear Spectroscopy[LENS], “for the first observation of Anderson localisation and of anomalous transport phenomena described by Lévy statistics in the framework of his highly original research on light propagation in disordered media“.

The L’Aquila sentences – the role and responsibility of scientists

On 10 November 2014 the L’Aquila appellate court cleared Italian scientists of the manslaughter charges after the earthquake of 6 April 2009. The six leading scientists and disaster experts, and the Deputy Head of the Department of Civil Protection [DPC], had been given, in the first instance trial in 2012, a six-year jail sentence. “The credibility of Italy’s entire scientific community has been restored” commented S. Gresta, the president of the INGV.

In the L’Aquila region, an area of high seismic activity, a seismic sequence started in January 2009 and continued in …

SIF Fermi Prize to Car and Parrinello

The 2012 Enrico Fermi Prize of the Italian Physical Society [SIF] has been awarded in the field of condensed matter physics to Roberto Car, of Princeton University, and Michele Parrinello, of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich, for “the discovery of a Molecular Dynamics method known the world over as the Car-Parrinello method. This method has been a breakthrough in the field of numerical simulations, with great impact in many interdisciplinary contexts both theoretical and experimental, ranging from Material Science to Chemistry and Biology”…

Asian experiments unlock neutrino oscillation mystery

Two reactor experiments, China’s Daya Bay and Korea’s RENO, have made the best measurement of the neutrino mixing angle, θ₁₃, an essential property for neutrino research. The discovery of a non-zero θ₁₃ at approximately 9˚ – which was published in March and Apri this year – completes our picture of neutrino mixing. This quite large value for the mixing angle will make it easier to conduct future long baseline neutrino experiments. This, in turn, may lead to a better understanding of the matter-antimatter asymmetry seen in the Universe…