Emilio Segrè (1905-1989), tiburtino, 1959 Nobel laureate in physics
Emilio Gino Segrè was born in Tivoli probably on January 30 or 31, 1905 although he was registered at the Registry Office on February 1. He was the third of three sons (brothers were Angelo and Marco). Father Giuseppe Abramo Segrè, an industrialist, became owner of the Cartiere Tiburtine paper mills and was also administrator of Villa d’Este, then owned by Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Habsburg.
Mother Amelia Susanna Treves, daughter of a well-known Florentine architect, died in October 1943 deported to Auschwitz. Emilio attended elementary and middle school in Tivoli. Until his first gymnasium, he studied at the Royal National Boarding School “Amedeo di Savoia Duca di Aosta” in Tivoli. Later in Rome he attended the Mamiani Gymnasium.
After high school, he enrolled in the first year of engineering at the University of Rome in 1922, although his real passion was physics.
Having reached the end of his fourth year, he met Enrico Fermi, Professor of Theoretical Physics, and decided to switch to Physics studies. He graduated in July 1928 precisely with Fermi and, after his military service, devoted himself to research in atomic spectroscopy, partly in the group of Ragazzi di via Panisperna consisting of Enrico Fermi, Edoardo Amaldi, Franco Rasetti, Bruno Pontecorvo, Oscar D’Agostino and Ettore Majorana.
In 1934, Emilio Segrè began to devote himself to research in nuclear physics and atomic spectroscopy conducted with Enrico Fermi and focused mainly on the study of neutrons, which led to the discovery of “slow neutrons,” fundamental to the development of nuclear energy.
In November 1935 he won a competition for the chair of Experimental Physics at the University of Palermo. On February 2, 1936, in the Great Synagogue in Rome he had married Elfriede Spiro (1907-1970), whom he had met in Rome two years earlier.
She was a German Jew who fled Breslau and emigrated to Italy because of anti-Semitic laws (in Germany since 1935-in Italy since 1938).
Three children would be born from the marriage: Claudio (born March 2, 1937, in Palermo), followed by Amelia (born November 9, 1942) and Fausta (born November 7, 1945), both in Los Alamos.
In November 1937 Emilio Segrè helped his friend Ettore Majorana to obtain the chair of Theoretical Physics at the University of Naples: without competition, but “by clear fame“. At only 31 years old.
In the summer of 1938 he decided to go to the United States to study some radioisotopes. There he learned that the Fascist government in Italy had enacted the racial laws, for which he had lost his job as a professor.
He wrote to his wife to join him with their first son Claudius, who was not yet two years old. Here his research proceeded successfully.
In 1941 he developed some methods for the isotopic analysis of Uranium that later turned out to be of great importance for the birth of the atomic battery and nuclear devices. In 1946 he had a professorship at the University of California, where he taught until 1972.
He discovered the elements technetium (which is the main radionuclide used in nuclear medicine in the diagnostic field), astate and plutonium-239 (the nuclear explosive). In 1955 he discovered the antiproton in high-energy proton-nucleon interactions. For this, he was awarded the “Nobel Prize in Physics” together with Owen Chamberlain in 1959.
In 1970, during a trip to Italy, his wife Elfriede died; two years later, in 1972, he married his second wife Rosa Mines (1926-1997), a Uruguayan, whom he had met in 1966. In 1974 he returned to Rome to give courses in nuclear physics and lectures.
He died on April 22, 1989, in Lafayette, California.
[Alumni of the National Boarding School have erected a bronze bust to Emilio Segrè, the work of Tiburtinian master Elverio Veroli. Prof. Antonino Zichichi and Prof. Giuseppe Franco Bassani, president of the Italian Physical Society, were godparents at the June 7, 2003 ceremony].
