REMEMBERING NICOLA CABIBBO 10 YEARS AFTER HIS DEATH
Interview with Luciano Maiani, Professor Emeritus of Theoretical Physics at the Sapienza University of Rome, national member of the Accademia dei Lincei

On 16 August 2010, Nicola Cabibbo passed away at 75 years old. Cabibbo was a leading figure of one of the most exciting and prolific periods in the history of particle physics: the period between the post-WWI years and the end of last century. These were the years in which the Standard Model took shape: the great theory that is still today the reference for studying the ultimate constituents of matter. The Standard Model is the result of joining and summarising hypotheses aimed at describing the behaviour of three of the four fundamental interactions existing in nature (electromagnetic, nuclear, and weak forces) and of the particles associated with these. In 1963, Cabibbo inextricably linked his name to the Standard Model when he provided a universal explanation for the weak decay of particles, with and without strangeness (strange particles contain a strange quark). He hypothesised that the weak decays of all particles are determined by the transition of a single quark, which is the overlap of the down and strange quarks, determined by a new universal constant, later named “Cabibbo angle”. Cabibbo’s theory satisfyingly explained the data then available, an agreement that, with the improvements in data accuracy, has become increasingly precise. Right from its publication, Cabibbo’s theory was seen as a crucial development in particle physics. Abraham Pais, in his book “Inward Bound”, cites Cabibbo’s theory as one of the most important developments in particle physics since the war. In “History of CERN”, John Iliopoulos writes: “With this work (Cabibbo) consolidated his position as one of the main theorists in the area of weak interactions”. Cabibbo’s mixing idea was then applied to neutrinos by Bruno Pontecorvo, who hypothesised a new phenomenon, neutrino oscillation. Cabibbo’s happy intuition allowed scientists in the following years to first hypothesise and then prove the existence of other types of quarks (charm, top and bottom) and to develop a flavour theory that could include the new particles. Several Nobel Prizes were awarded to those involved in developing the Standard Model, with the exclusion of Cabibbo in 2008; his death in 2010 made this exclusion definitive. This is still a living disappointment for Italian physics. 10 years after his death, on 15 December, the INFN Frascati National Laboratories, the place where this giant of physics started his career, paid homage to Nicola Cabibbo with a symposium dedicated to his memory. Apart from his indisputable scientific merits, Cabibbo’s successes in his role as science manager were also re-traced during the event. He held this role, alongside his commitment to training new generations of physicists, as president of INFN (from 1983 until 1992) and of ENEA (from 1993 to 1998). Thus, he became a reference figure for planning Italian strategic research activities. The testimonies that followed one another in the course of the symposium included that of Luciano Maiani, who was a friend and colleague of Cabibbo, as well as his successor in leading INFN.

Professor, can you share one of your personal memories of Nicola Cabibbo with us?
It would be impossible to choose just one. Having worked with Nicola for so many years, the memories I accumulated are practically infinite. Of course, the best ones relate to the beginning of our collaboration, when he was already a very famous figure within the physics community, while I was a young researcher who had only graduated a few years before. ...

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