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Ettore Majorana
Ettore Majorana (/ˌmaɪ.əˈrɑːnə/ MY-ə-RAH-nə, Italian: [ˈɛttore majoˈraːna]; 5 August 1906 – disappeared 25 March 1938) was an Italian theoretical physicist who worked on neutrino masses.
The Majorana equation, Majorana fermions, and Microsoft's device attempting to create topological qubits, Majorana 1, are named after him. In 2006, the Majorana Prize was established in his memory.
In 1938, Enrico Fermi was quoted as saying about Majorana: "There are several categories of scientists in the world; those of second or third rank do their best but never get very far. Then there is the first rank, those who make important discoveries, fundamental to scientific progress. But then there are the geniuses, like Galilei and Newton. Majorana was one of these."
Majorana was a supporter of Italian fascism and a member of the National Fascist Party. Historical context indicates that after 1931, the Italian government required all university professors to swear an oath of loyalty to the Fascist regime to maintain their positions. He disappeared under mysterious circumstances after purchasing a ticket to travel by ship from Palermo to Naples. An investigation concluded in 2015 found evidence suggesting Majorana lived in Valencia, Venezuela, between 1955 and 1959. The case was officially closed with the conclusion that he had emigrated.
Majorana was born in Catania, Sicily. Majorana's uncle Quirino Majorana was also a physicist. Mathematically gifted, Majorana began his university studies in engineering in 1923, but switched to physics in 1928 at the urging of Emilio Segrè. He was very young when he joined Enrico Fermi's team in Rome as one of the "Via Panisperna boys", who took their name from the street address of their laboratory.
Majorana was an enthusiastic and devout Catholic.
Majorana's first papers dealt with problems in atomic spectroscopy. His first paper, published in 1928, was written when he was an undergraduate and it was coauthored by Giovanni Gentile, Jr., a junior professor at the Institute of Physics in Rome. This work was an early quantitative application to atomic spectroscopy of Fermi's statistical model of atomic structure (now known as the Thomas–Fermi model, due to its contemporaneous description by Llewellyn Thomas).
In this paper, Majorana and Gentile performed first-principles calculations within the context of this model that gave a good account of experimentally-observed core electron energies of gadolinium and uranium, and of the fine structure splitting of caesium lines observed in optical spectra. In 1931, Majorana published the first paper on the phenomenon of autoionization in atomic spectra, which he called "spontaneous ionization"; an independent paper in the same year, published by Allen Shenstone of Princeton University, called it "auto-ionization", a name first used by Pierre Auger. This name, without the hyphen, has since become the conventional term for the phenomenon.
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Ettore Majorana
Ettore Majorana (/ˌmaɪ.əˈrɑːnə/ MY-ə-RAH-nə, Italian: [ˈɛttore majoˈraːna]; 5 August 1906 – disappeared 25 March 1938) was an Italian theoretical physicist who worked on neutrino masses.
The Majorana equation, Majorana fermions, and Microsoft's device attempting to create topological qubits, Majorana 1, are named after him. In 2006, the Majorana Prize was established in his memory.
In 1938, Enrico Fermi was quoted as saying about Majorana: "There are several categories of scientists in the world; those of second or third rank do their best but never get very far. Then there is the first rank, those who make important discoveries, fundamental to scientific progress. But then there are the geniuses, like Galilei and Newton. Majorana was one of these."
Majorana was a supporter of Italian fascism and a member of the National Fascist Party. Historical context indicates that after 1931, the Italian government required all university professors to swear an oath of loyalty to the Fascist regime to maintain their positions. He disappeared under mysterious circumstances after purchasing a ticket to travel by ship from Palermo to Naples. An investigation concluded in 2015 found evidence suggesting Majorana lived in Valencia, Venezuela, between 1955 and 1959. The case was officially closed with the conclusion that he had emigrated.
Majorana was born in Catania, Sicily. Majorana's uncle Quirino Majorana was also a physicist. Mathematically gifted, Majorana began his university studies in engineering in 1923, but switched to physics in 1928 at the urging of Emilio Segrè. He was very young when he joined Enrico Fermi's team in Rome as one of the "Via Panisperna boys", who took their name from the street address of their laboratory.
Majorana was an enthusiastic and devout Catholic.
Majorana's first papers dealt with problems in atomic spectroscopy. His first paper, published in 1928, was written when he was an undergraduate and it was coauthored by Giovanni Gentile, Jr., a junior professor at the Institute of Physics in Rome. This work was an early quantitative application to atomic spectroscopy of Fermi's statistical model of atomic structure (now known as the Thomas–Fermi model, due to its contemporaneous description by Llewellyn Thomas).
In this paper, Majorana and Gentile performed first-principles calculations within the context of this model that gave a good account of experimentally-observed core electron energies of gadolinium and uranium, and of the fine structure splitting of caesium lines observed in optical spectra. In 1931, Majorana published the first paper on the phenomenon of autoionization in atomic spectra, which he called "spontaneous ionization"; an independent paper in the same year, published by Allen Shenstone of Princeton University, called it "auto-ionization", a name first used by Pierre Auger. This name, without the hyphen, has since become the conventional term for the phenomenon.