Antonio Zoccoli took over as President of INFN from July 1, following INFN Board of Directors presidential nomination, last 30 May, and the nomination decree of Italy’s Ministry of Education, Universities and Research (MIUR). Zoccoli succeeds Fernando Ferroni, who presided over the institute for two terms beginning in 2011. Born in Bologna in 1961, Antonio Zoccoli graduated in physics at the University of Bologna where he is now Professor of Experimental Physics. Zoccoli was an associate researcher with the Bologna INFN division, of which he was the director from 2006 to 2011, and a member of the INFN Executive Board since 2011, of which he was also Vice President. Throughout his scientific career, Zoccoli has been active in the field of experimental fundamental, nuclear and subnuclear physics. He first held the role of member of the Muon Catalysed Fusion Collaboration at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (UK) and of OBELIX at CERN in Geneva. Later, he participated in the HERA-B experiment at the DESY laboratory in Hamburg. Since 2005, he has been a member of the ATLAS collaboration at CERN that, together with the CMS collaboration, announced the first observation of the Higgs boson in July 2012. Zoccoli is co-author of more than 700 scientific and technical publications in international journals. He is actively involved in the popularisation of science and, since 2008, has led the Fondazione Giuseppe Occhialini for the popularisation of physics. We asked the new president about his vision of INFN’s future.
Your election as president is recent, but you have followed INFN research policy for many years, first as director, then as a member of the Executive Board. What is the state of INFN’s health? What are its strong points, and what elements need strengthening?
INFN is the only Italian research organisation engaged in the field of nuclear and elementary particle physics, as well as in the more recent field of astroparticle physics. It enjoys the privilege of relying on its own big research facilities, which it won with its capacity for vision and its determination. ...
ITER, a project for the construction of the first nuclear fusion reactor in Cadarache, France, and the Padua-based RFX Consortium, consisting of CNR, ENEA, INFN, University of Padua and Acciaierie Venete SpA, have signed a collaboration agreement for the experimentation, in Italy, on the most powerful ...
For the first time, a realistic computational model has been created to explain the reproduction mechanism of prion, a toxic protein that, in the middle of the 1990s, became famous throughout the world as the protein that causes the “mad-cow disease.” The study, which has been published in ...
This center is called EuCAPT (the European Center for AstroParticle Theory) and it will coordinate all the activities and proposals of European centres and groups that are active in the field of theoretical astroparticle physics. Its launch was ratified by the signing of an agreement between CERN and APPEC (the ...
Officially kicked off on 5 July 2019 in Rome during an event at the Ministry of Education, University and Research (MIUR), for the next 3 years, EOSC-Pillar will coordinate national Open Science efforts across Austria, Belgium, France, Germany and Italy, and ensure their contribution and readiness for the ...
EPS-HEP 2019: A PRIZE FOR THE DISCOVERY OF THE TOP QUARK AND FOR MEASURING ITS PROPERTIES
The European Physical Society (EPS) has awarded the High Energy and Particle Physics Prize 2019 to the CDF and D0 scientific collaborations at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) for the discovery of the top quark and the detailed measurements of its properties. The prize was awarded during the EPS conference that was held in Ghent, Belgium, from 10 to 17 July. It is a recognition that is awarded every two years to one or more people, or to collaborations, that have distinguished themselves for having made an exceptional contribution to high energy and particle physics in the technological, theoretical, or experimental fields. The discovery of the top quark was jointly announced by the CDF and D0 collaborations in 1995. The two scientific collaborations, in which hundreds of scientists from all over the world participated, managed to measure the mass of the top quark - the last of the six quarks described by particle theory to have escaped observation. They could do so with a high degree of precision thanks to data collected by Fermilab’s Tevatron particle accelerator, and they subsequently studied the quark’s properties in detail. CDF is the acronym for the Collider Detector at Fermilab, the laboratory that, at the time, hosted the most powerful particle accelerator in the world, the Tevatron. The latter was a ring in which protons and antiprotons were accelerated up to speeds almost equal to the speed of light in order to make them frontally collide in the detectors. ...
Cover CDF experiement (Collider Detector at Fermilab)
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