The Life and Ideas of Bruno Pontecorvo

Bruno Pontecorvo is an outstanding Italian and Soviet physicist. His life is remarkable: he was born in Pisa, graduated from university in Rome, worked alongside Enrico Fermi and Joliot-Curie. During World War II, he emigrated to the United States, where he worked for an oil company and invented a method for neutron logging of oil. Pontecorvo participated in the British atomic project Tube Alloys, and when in 1950 he unexpectedly emigrated to the USSR with his wife and three children, suspicions of espionage immediately arose. Especially since for the first five years, no one knew where Pontecorvo was and what he was doing. The book presents archival documents showing that all those years Pontecorvo was engaged in research in the field of elementary particle physics and had no relation either to Soviet atomic spies or to the creation of an atomic bomb in the USSR. Pontecorvo's remarkable ideas laid the foundation for modern neutrino physics and became the basis for the extensive program of neutrino physics research conducted today. Six Nobel Prizes have been awarded for the experimental verification of Pontecorvo's ideas. This book is a story about his life and scientific discoveries.