Bruno Pontecorvo

Bruno Pontecorvo (Russian: Бру́но Макси́мович Понтеко́рво, Bruno Maksimovich Pontekorvo; 22 August 1913 – 24 September 1993) was an Italian nuclear physicist, an early assistant of Enrico Fermi and then the author of numerous studies in high energy physics, especially on neutrinos. According to Oleg Gordievsky (the highest-ranking KGB officer ever to defect) and Pavel Sudoplatov (former deputy director of Foreign Intelligence for the Soviet Union), Pontecorvo was also a Soviet agent. A convinced communist, he defected to the Soviet Union in 1950, where he continued his research on the decay of the muon and on neutrinos. The prestigious Pontecorvo Prize was instituted in his memory in 1995.

Early life and education

Pontecorvo was born in Marina di Pisa into a wealthy non-observant Italian Jewish family. After attending the first two years of Engineering at the University of Pisa, at only 18 he was admitted to the third year of Physics at the University of Rome La Sapienza. There he soon became one of the closest (and the youngest) assistants of Fermi and one of the so-called Via Panisperna boys (as Fermi's group of scientists is often called, after the name of the street where the Institute of Physics of Rome University was then situated). Fermi described Pontecorvo as "scientifically one of the brightest men with whom I have come in contact in my scientific career".

Pontecorvo

Pontecorvo is a town and comune in the province of Frosinone, Lazio, Italy. Its population is 13,400.

History

The village lies under Rocca Guglielma, a medieval fortification perched on an inaccessible spur. Its name derives from the pons curvus, "curved bridge", that may still be seen spanning the Liri in the center of the town that grew around the bridgehead in the course of the Middle Ages. The curve of the bridge was intended to divert timbers that might strike its piers during floods. The folk etymology of corvo, "crow", symbol of the "black monks", the Benedictines of the abbey of Monte Cassino, within whose secular territory, the Terra Sancti Benedicti, Pontecorvo lay, is displayed in the town's modern coat-of-arms, which represents a crow surmounting a curved bridge.

In Roman times the agricultural region was governed from Aquinum, the modern Aquino. Some Roman remains have been retrieved from a villa site at Sant'Oliva. The medieval commune dates from 860, when Rodoaldo, the Lombard gastaldo of Aquino, erected the first version of the walled fortification on the rocca, intended to guard the bridgehead from Saracen intruders coming up the Liri. The castle's chapel seems to have been dedicated to Saint Bartholomew; on the ruins of the Lombard castello was erected the earliest Cathedral of San Bartolomeo of which the campanile was a rebuilding of the castellan's tower. Two medieval quarters developed, Cività within the walls and Pastine in the meadows between the city walls and the river. The little bridgehead settlement formed part of the County of Capua; there in 866 Louis II, Holy Roman Emperor, set up camp at Pontecorvo in campaigns against the Saracens. In 960 Atenulf succeeded in attaching Pontecorvo to his gastaldate of Aquino; at his death his lands were divided into a county of Aquino and a county of Pontecorvo.

Pontecorvo (disambiguation)

Pontecorvo may refer to :

See also