Related papers: Fermi and Szilard
Enrico Fermi estimated the yield of the Trinity test to be about 10 kilotons by dropping small pieces of paper and observing their motion in the blast wave. This is about 40% of the radiochemically derived value of $25 \pm 2$ kilotons that…
The theory of nuclear forces has made great progress since the turn of the millenium using the framework of chiral effective field theory (ChEFT). The advantage of this approach, which was originally proposed by Weinberg, is that it has a…
The 1950 lunch-table remark by Enrico Fermi `Where is everybody' has started intensive scientific and philosophical discussions about what we call nowadays the `Fermi paradox': If there had been ever a single advanced civilization in the…
This note is devoted to a detail concerning the work of Albert Einstein and Peter Bergmann on unified theories of electromagnetism and gravitation in five dimensions. In their paper of 1938, Einstein and Bergmann were among the first to…
We discuss 2f production at LC energies (f \neq t). This type of reaction has a big event number and may give interesting hints to the existence and perhaps to details of New Physics like susy, LQ, Z', etc. {For} any search the radiative…
Ettore Majorana proposed an important improvement to the Thomas-Fermi statistical model for atoms, with a communication at the general meeting of the Italian Physical Society, held in Rome, on December 29th, 1928, regularly published on…
An International Working Group has been meeting to discuss ideas for a new Nuclear Reactor Neutrino Experiment at meetings in May 2003 (Alabama), October 2003 (Munich) and plans for March 2004 (Niigata). This White Paper Report on the…
Fermi helped establish a new framework for understanding matter, based on quantum theory. This framework refines and improves traditional atomism in two crucial respects. First, the elementary constituents of matter belong to a very small…
On July 16, 1945, the Trinity nuclear test exploded in the desert near Alamogordo, NM. A variety of new diagnostic experiments were fielded in an effort to understand the detailed performance of the nuclear device. This article describes a…
An historical overview is given of the relevant steps that allowed the genesis of the quantum theory of the chemical bond, starting from the appearance of the new quantum mechanics and following later developments till approximately 1931.…
A complete theoretical model describing artificial disintegration of nuclei by bombardment with alpha-particles, developed by Majorana as early as in 1930, is discussed in detail alongside the basic experimental evidences that motivated it.…
A new solution to the Fermi Paradox is presented: probes or visits from putative alien civilizations have a very low probability until a civilization reaches a certain age (called the Contact Era) after the onset of radio communications. If…
This is my individual contribution to the discussions ongoing on the update of the European Strategy for Particle Physics. After participating in many discussions and contributing to a number of documents being prepared for the ESPP…
During the past two decades, it has been demonstrated that chiral effective field theory represents a powerful tool to deal with nuclear forces in a systematic and model-independent way. Two-, three-, and four-nucleon forces have been…
In the period from about 1890 to 1915 an interdisciplinary and unifying research programme known as "cosmical physics" attracted much scientific and public attention. It typically included aspects of the earth sciences (such as magnetic…
We present a precise formulation of a correspondence between information and thermodynamics that was first observed by Szilard, and later studied by Landauer. The correspondence identifies available free energy with relative entropy, and…
The chart of nuclei could be enlarged with a branch describing neutron stars that are huge nuclei of a few solar masses held together by gravity force and sustained by the pressure due to the degenerate Fermi sea. We contend in this…
Back in the mid eighties, a new branch of investigation which was related to the interaction of eta mesons with nuclei came into existence. It started with the theoretical prediction of possible exotic states of eta mesons and nuclei bound…
In a classic thought experiment, Szilard suggested a heat engine where a single particle, for example an atom or a molecule, is confined in a container coupled to a single heat bath. The container can be separated into two parts by a…
At the kind request of the Editor of Hadronic Journal, and of TEC/TNRG (Usa), we recall in this article some elementary historical information about the role played by Ettore Majorana[1-17] with regard to the Neutron, and to the Neutrino.…