Related papers: Fermi and Szilard
Enrico Fermi lived from 1901 to 1954, a period of great progress in physics and a period in which opportunities for women to study and work in institutions of higher learning increased significantly in Europe and North America. Though there…
The first time one of us (G.P.) encountered Earle was in Summer 1966, when she was directed to study Earle's papers on radiative corrections to quasi-elastic electron scattering. The suggestion had come from Bruno Touschek, at the time head…
K. Alex M\"uller started his scientific career in 1958 when he was about thirty-one years old. After his wife passed away and being in his nineties, his interest in physics gradually faded. In those years shortly before he passed away, on…
We comment on a recent paper announcing the discovery of a previously unknown publication of Ettore Majorana on the Thomas-Fermi atomic model. In pointing out that such a publication was not written by Majorana, we correct some…
Half a century ago, T. Kibble proposed a scenario for topological defect formation from symmetry breaking during the expansion of the early Universe. W. Zurek later crystallized the concept to superfluid helium, predicting a power-law…
Julian Schwinger became interested in the Casimir effect in 1975. His original impetus was to understand the quantum force between parallel plates without the concept of zero point fluctuations of field quanta, in the language of source…
The idea of the preferred frame as a remedy for difficulties of the relativistic quantum mechanics in description of the non-local quantum phenomena was undertaken by such physicists as J. S. Bell and D. Bohm. The possibility of the…
This article is set during the 1944 and 1945 final push to complete Project Y -- the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos -- and focuses primarily on overcoming the challenge of creating and demonstrating a successful convergent explosive…
Back in 1964, the theoretical physicists Francois Englert and Robert Brout, as well as Peter Higgs, suggested an explanation for the fact that most elementary particles - such as the electron - have a mass. This scenario predicted a new…
Almost exactly 3 decades ago, in the fall of 1986, the era of experimental ultra-relativistic (\emph{E/m $\gg 1$}) heavy ion physics started simultaneously at the SPS at CERN and the AGS at Brookhaven with first beams of light Oxygen ions…
A Fermi accelerator is a billiard with oscillating walls. A leaky accelerator interacts with an environment of an ideal gas at equilibrium by exchange of particles through a small hole on its boundary. Such interaction may heat the gas: we…
The nuclear interaction is responsible for keeping neutrons and protons joined in an atomic nucleus. Phenomenological nuclear potentials, fitted to experimental data, allow one to know about the nuclear behaviour with more or less success…
This talk examines a number of reaction mechanisms for scattering initiated by an exotic projectile. Comparisons are made with recent experimental data, in order to extract information on the peculiarity of the nuclear structure under…
Forty years ago, Richard Feynman proposed harnessing quantum physics to build a more powerful kind of computer. Realizing Feynman's vision is one of the grand challenges facing 21st century science and technology. In this article, we'll…
A 1929 Gedankenexperiment proposed by Szil\'ard, often referred to as "Szil\'ard's engine", has served as a foundation for computing fundamental thermodynamic bounds to information processing. While Szil\'ard's original box could be…
In 1996 Lee, Osheroff and Richardson received the Nobel Prize for their 1971 discovery of superfluid helium 3 -- a discovery which opened the door to the most fascinating system known in condensed matter physics. The superfluid phases of…
In a Thomas-Fermi model, calculations are presented for nuclei beyond the nuclear drip line at zero temperature. These nuclei are in equilibrium by the presence of an external gas, as may be envisaged in the astrophysical scenario. We find…
At very high energies, weak coupling, non-perturbative methods can be used to study classical gluon production in nuclear collisions. One observes in numerical simulations that after an initial ``formation'' time, the produced partons are…
Long term plans for the investigation of the quark and gluon structure of matter have for some time focussed on the possibility of an electron-ion collider, with the nuclear physics communities associated with JLab and BNL being…
In the classic multi-stage Stern$-$Gerlach experiment conducted by Frisch and Segr\`e, the Majorana (Landau$-$Zener) and Rabi formulae diverge afar from the experimental observation while the physical mechanism for electron-spin collapse…