Italian Physical Society
Publications
Enrico Fermi Prize
The prestigious prize "Enrico Fermi" has been awarded starting from 2001, to commemorate the great scientist on the occasion of the centenary of his birth. The prize is yearly awarded to Members of the Society who particularly honoured Italian physics with their discoveries. A commission made of experts appointed by SIF, Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, CNR, INFN and INFM (now part of CNR) selects the winner(s) among a list of candidates and sends the proposal to the Council of SIF for final approval.
List of winners
Enrico Fermi Award 2009
Winners: Dimitri NANOPOULOS and Miguel Angel VIRASORO.
Reasons: for the relevance of their theoretical results in the study of global and local symmetries in field and strings theories. To Dimitri Nanopoulos for the discovery of fundamental phenomenological properties of grand unification and superstring theories. To Miguel Angel Virasoro for the discovery of an infinite-dimensional algebra of primary importance for the costruction of string theories.
Enrico Fermi Award 2008
Winners: Giulio CASATI, Luigi LUGIATO and Luciano PIETRONERO.
Reasons: for their fundamental theoretical results in the field of complex systems. To Giulio Casati for his understanding of the relationship between classical and quantum chaos also in relation to quantum computing. To Luigi Lugiato for the discovery of instability-driven structures in non linear light-matter interactions. To Luciano Pietronero for demonstrating the onset of fractal shapes in a variety of self-organizing phenomena.
Enrico Fermi Award 2007
Winners: Milla BALDO CEOLIN, Ettore FIORINI and Italo MANNELLI.
Reasons: for their fundamental experimental results in the field of weak interactions. To Milla Baldo Ceolin for her outstanding works on K-meson and neutrino physics. To Ettore Fiorini for his contribution to the discovery of weak neutral currents and to the study of solar neutrinos. To Italo Mannelli for the demonstration of direct CP symmetry breaking in the K-meson decay.
Enrico Fermi Award 2006
Winners: Giorgio CARERI and Fortunato Tito ARECCHI
Reasons: for their pioneering contributions to the knowledge of coherence phenomena in matter and radiation. To Giorgio Careri for the discovery of quantum vortices in superfluid helium. To Fortunato Tito Arecchi for the first experimental demonstration of the statistical properties of coherent radiation.
Enrico Fermi Award 2005
Winners: Sergio FERRARA, Gabriele VENEZIANO and Bruno ZUMINO
Reasons: for their discoveries that significantly contributed to the development of modern theories of Gravity. To Sergio Ferrara for his contribution to the discovery of the theory of Supergravity. To Gabriele Veneziano for his discovery of Dual Models, subsequently acknowledged as the theoretical basis for a string theory of Quantum Gravity. To Bruno Zumino for his contributions to Supersimmetry and Supergravity theories.
Enrico Fermi Award 2004
Winner: Massimo INGUSCIO
Reasons: for his contributions to the study of atomic Bose-Einstein condensates, in particular for the realization of degenerate quantum mixtures of bosons and fermions, and the invention of new experimental techniques that allowed him to obtain the first Bose-Einstein condensation of 41K atoms.
Enrico Fermi Award 2003
Winners: Nicola CABIBBO, Raffaele Raul GATTO and Luciano MAIANI
Reasons: for their fundamental contributions to the theory of weak interactions. To Nicola Cabibbo for his theory of down- and strange-quark mixing in weak decays, in which the well-known parameter called "Cabibbo angle" plays a key role. To Raffaele Raoul Gatto for his pioneering works in the field of strange-particle weak decays and for his role of leader in this fundamental field of subnuclear physics. To Luciano Maiani for having introduced, together with S. Glashow and J. Iliopoulos, the so-called GIM mechanism which, predicting the existence of the fourth quark, allowed to solve the problem of flavour-changing neutral currents.
Enrico Fermi Award 2002
Winner: Giorgio PARISI
Reason: for his contributions to field theory and statistical mechanics, and in particular for his fundamental results concerning the statistical properties of disordered systems.
Enrico Fermi Award 2001
Winner: Antonino ZICHICHI
Reason: for his discovery of the first example of nuclear antimatter (the antideuteron) and for his works that paved the way to the discovery of the charged heavy lepton.
