Giuseppe Cocconi

Giuseppe Cocconi (* 1914 in Como, † 9 November 2008) was an Italian physicist who worked on elementary particle physics and was formerly Director of Research at CERN.

Life and work

Cocconi interested as a teenager, especially for astronomy. He studied physics at the University of Milan, where he received his diploma in 1937 ( Laurea ). From February 1938 he was invited by Edoardo Amaldi in Rome, where he became the part of the renowned physicist Group by Enrico Fermi. With Fermi He built a Wilson cloud chamber for the detection of the decay of mesons from cosmic radiation ( in the pre- accelerator - time the main source of high energy elementary particles ). In August 1938 he returned to Milan and transferred the learned in Rome physical processes in a research group to cosmic radiation. One of his doctoral students there, Vanna Tongiorgi, 1945 was his wife (her first release was, however, as early as 1939 ). In 1942 he became a professor at the University of Catania and at the same time resulted from work on infrared detection for the Italian Air Force. After the war he taught in Catania.

In 1947, he went at the invitation of Hans Bethe at Cornell University. In experiments on Echo Lake in the Rocky Mountains Cocconi proved with his wife, the galactic and even extragalactic origin of cosmic rays. Add to Cornell Cocconi became interested in the detection of extraterrestrial intelligence in collaboration with Philip Morrison. They advocated a search on the 21 cm radio wavelength of neutral hydrogen with radio telescopes, which was followed in the SETI program later.

1959 to 1961 he was at CERN in the early stages of the local proton synchrotron involved (from 1959 in operation) and examined with this the behavior of the cross sections eg in proton-proton scattering or proton-nucleus scattering. 1962-1963 he experimented in similar experiments at the proton synchrotron at Brookhaven National Laboratory. In 1963 he was again at CERN and discovered there with Alan Whetherell, Bert Diddens and other phenomenon in the high- energy behavior of the proton - proton scattering, which was interpreted as an exchange of two Regge poles, the so-called " Pomeron ", which had been predicted by Pomeranchuk. 1967 to 1969 he was Director of Research at CERN. He developed there a particle, which he called " Roman pot " and with that he the increase in proton-proton cross sections proved at the Intersecting Storage Rings (ISR ) at CERN at high energies. In the 1970s he was a leader with Klaus Winter in the Charm collaboration at CERN, the electron-neutrino scattering examined. In 1979 he joined CERN in retirement, but continued to meet regularly visited CERN.

In 1955 he was Guggenheim Fellow. As for his attitude on price and academies, was at the CERN Obituary: His refusal of association with academies, and his lack of interest in prizes and honors, as well as his wish not to talk publicly, after his retirement, of his scientific life, are well known.