The physicists René Brun and Pantaleo Raimondi yesterday received the Aldo Menzione prize for their exceptional contributions to the devolopment of innovative detection techniques. The prize, worth € 2,500, was awarded by the “Frontier Detectors for Frontier Physics” association, during a ceremony that took place at La Biodola, on Elba, during the international conference: “15th Pisa Meeting on Advanced Detectors: Frontier Detectors for Frontier Physics”. In particular, René Brun, CERN researcher, received recognition for having developed the PAW and ROOT software, essential tools for analysing experimental data in the field of particle physics. And Pantaleo Raimondi, former director of the ESRF Accelerator and Source Division and of the INFN Frascati National Laboratories accelerator division, was recognised for having devised and developed the “Crab Waist” technique, demonstrated for the first time in 2008 at the DAFNE accelerator of the INFN National Laboratories of Frascati, that proved to be a crucial tool for focusing the micro-beams of particles in electron-positron colliders.
The prime is named in the memory of Aldo Menzione. An INFN physicist of international fame, Menzione won the prestigious Panofsky Prize in 2009 for elementary particle physics, for the design and construction of the first silicon vertex detector. This detector enabled the discovery, in 1995, of the top quark at Fermilab in Chicago, and forged new paths for the physics of very high-energy collisions of hadrons.
