Related papers: Ettore Majorana and his heritage seventy years lat…
The physics of the mysterious and stealthy neutrino is at the heart of many phenomena in the cosmos. These particles interact with matter and with each other through the aptly named weak interaction. At typical astrophysical energies the…
The Milanese period in Albert Einstein's life is a key one for the understanding of the development of his scientific questioning. While being a student in Z\"urich from 1896, Einstein returned regularly to Milan to meet his family for the…
In this talk I pay tribute to Toshimitsu Yamazaki who died earlier this year. Yamazaki's leading contributions to Hadronic Physics, in particular to Strangeness Nuclear Physics in Japan and elsewhere, are well known. Two of the five…
Since the daring intuition by Fritz Zwicky in 1933 about the existence of dark matter in the Universe, in spite of the extensive investigations pursued over a very long lapse of time, the nature of this matter and of its (other than…
We study Pontecorvo neutrino-antineutrino oscillations both in vacuum and in matter within a field theoretic approach, showing that this phenomenon can occur only if neutrinos have a Dirac-Majorana mass term. We find that matter effects…
The interaction of neutrinos with gravitational fields in the weak field regime at one loop to the leading order has been studied by Menon and Thalappilil. They deduced some theoretical differences between the Majorana and Dirac neutrinos.…
Majorana found a way to exploit the scaling properties of the Thomas-Fermi equation for converting this second-order differential equation into one of first order. We explore his method for the familiar neutral-atom solution and extend it…
The OPERA experiment reported recently a puzzling result. The time of flight of a neutrino beam between the CERN and the Gran Sasso Laboratory has been measured to be slightly shorter than expected. More precisely, an early arrival time of…
Existing data on neutrino-electron scattering do not imply that neutrinos are not Majorana particles. The question of whether neutrinos are of Majorana or of Dirac character remains completely open.
We give an account of the main achievements of the scientific career of Andrea Vitturi so far, that have recently been discussed during the workshop "Theoretical Nuclear Physics in Padova" on the occasion of his retirement from full…
Light sterile neutrinos with masses at the sub-eV or eV scale are hinted by current experimental and cosmological data. Assuming the Majorana nature of these hypothetical particles, we discuss their effects in the neutrinoless double beta…
Introduction for a special issue of Physica E dedicated to the memory of Markus B\"uttiker.
The sixteen years old Albert Einstein made friend with Ernestina Marangoni in the summer of 1895 in Pavia. We discuss in this article the unacknowledged link between Albert Einstein and the physicist and professor Carlo Marangoni,…
In these shorts notes I want to remembermy relationship with GianCarlo Ghirardi, who was my supervisor in my Master Degree in Physics at the University of Trieste and then he became a very deep and close friend. I don't want to describe in…
This paper deals with the Physics Institute of via Panisperna in Rome, getting ready for investigation on neutron physics before Fermi's discovery of neutron-induced radioactivity. The importance of nuclear research had been acknowledged in…
Answering well-known fundamental questions is usually regarded as the major goal of science. Discovery of other unknown and fundamental questions is, however, even more important. Recognition that "we didn't know anything" is the basic…
Dark matter is a fundamental constituent of the universe, which is needed to explain a wide variety of astrophysical and cosmological observations. Although the existence of dark matter was first postulated nearly a century ago and its…
This short review article provides a pedagogical introduction to the rapidly growing research field of Majorana fermions in topological superconductors. We first discuss in some details the simplest "toy model" in which Majoranas appear,…
At the beginning of the twentieth century, two scientists, the Austrian Victor Hess and the Italian Domenico Pacini, developed two brilliant lines of research independently, leading to the determination of the origin of atmospheric…
Cosmology is making impressive progress and it is producing stringent bounds on the sum of the neutrino masses {\Sigma}, a parameter of great importance for the current laboratory experiments. In this letter, we exploit the potential…