Segrè, Emilio

Segrè, Emilio (Gino)

(born Feb. 1, 1905, Tivoli, Italy—died April 22, 1989, Lafayette, Calif., U.S.) Italian-born U.S. physicist. He worked under Enrico Fermi before becoming director of the physics laboratory at the University of Palermo in 1936. In 1937 he discovered technetium, the first man-made element not found in nature. While visiting California in 1938, he was dismissed from the university by the fascist government. He continued his research at the University of California at Berkeley, where he and his associates discovered the element astatine and the isotope plutonium-239, which he found to be fissionable. In 1955, using the new Bevatron particle accelerator, Segrè and Owen Chamberlain (b. 1920) produced and identified antiprotons, antiparticles having the same mass as protons but opposite electrical charge, setting the stage for the discovery of many additional antiparticles. The two men shared a 1959 Nobel Prize.

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Segrè, Emilio (Gino) (1905–89) physicist; born in Tivoli, Italy. He discovered the slow neutron with Enrico Fermi at the University of Rome (1930–35), before moving to the University of Palermo (1935–38). A Jewish anti-Fascist, he left Mussolini's regime for the University of California: Berkeley (1938–72). There his work on synthesizing artificial atoms resulted in his isolation of fissionable plutonium (with Glenn Seaborg, 1940). After serving on the Manhattan Project (1943–46), Segrè discovered the antiproton (with Owen Chamberlain, 1955), for which the two shared the 1959 Nobel Prize in physics. Segrè continued his research in particle physics and worked to promote nuclear weapons bans.