Related papers: Ettore Majorana's course on Theoretical Physics: a…
We present and analyze in detail an unknown theory of ferromagnetism developed by Ettore Majorana as early as the beginnings of 1930s, substantially different in the methods employed from the well-known Heisenberg theory of 1928 (and from…
Late Winter Lecture Notes, Short Course (10 hours) of Relativistic Astrophysics held at the Department of Physics and Astronomy of the University of Padova, March 13-17, 2017. Third version.
These are the essence of two lectures given at the Ettore Majorana Summer School, 1997, and the discussion sections which followed them. The title indicates their content: some reasoned expectations for physics beyond the Standard Model,…
This purely recreational paper is about one of the most colorful characters of the Italian Renaissance, Girolamo Cardano, and the discovery of two basic ingredients of quantum theory, probability and complex numbers. The paper is dedicated…
In these lectures (at the 2007 Summer School in Akyaka, Mugla, Turkey), I discuss the various mechanisms for obtaining small Majorana neutrino masses, as well as specific models of varying complexity, in the context of the standard model…
On October 22, 1934, in a famous experiment, Enrico Fermi and his colleagues discovered that a significant increase in induced radioactivity can be obtained when neutrons are slowed down by means of hydrogen atoms. This discovery and its…
These notes are based on a lecture course by L. Chekhov held at the University of Manchester in May 2006 and February-March 2007. They are divulgative in character, and instead of containing rigorous mathematical proofs, they illustrate…
Ettore Majorana, in his short life, unintendedly has uncovered the most profound problem in quantum computation by his discovery of Majorana fermion, a particle which is its own anti-particle. Owing to its non-Abelian exchange statistics,…
Some important topics from history of neutrino physics over the last fifty years are discussed. History of neutrinos is older, at 4th December 2010 it will be eightieth anniversary of the "neutrino birth". In that day W. Pauli wrote the…
The possibility that neutrinos may be their own antiparticles, unique among the known fundamental particles, arises from the symmetric theory of fermions proposed by Ettore Majorana in 1937. Given the profound consequences of such Majorana…
These are notes of lectures on spinning particles and the worldline formalism originally given by Olindo Corradini and Christian Schubert at the School on Spinning Particles in Quantum Field Theory: Worldline Formalism, Higher Spins, and…
This paper describes the history of experimental neutrino physics in the physics department of Rome Sapienza University
Personal recollections on theoretical particle physics in the years when the Standard Theory was formed. In the background, the remarkable development of Italian theoretical physics in the second part of the last century, with great…
The discoveries and open questions in neutrino physics, as reported at Neutrino 2002 and more recently, are reviewed from a theoretical perspective.
In October 1604, when SN1604, the last naked-eye visible supernova in our Galaxy, exploded, Galileo Galilei was the professor of mathematics and astronomy at the University of Padua, teaching the mechanics of planets. He was therefore the…
The topics discussed in this lecture include: general properties of neutrinos in the SM, the theory of neutrino masses and mixings (Dirac and Majorana), neutrino oscillations both in vacuum and in matter, an overview of the experimental…
We discuss an unfortunate mistake, for a Dirac free particle, in the last Fermi lecture notes on quantum mechanics, in a course given at the University of Chicago in winter and spring of 1954. As is demonstrated, the correct result can be…
The 1937 theoretical discovery of Majorana fermions--whose defining property is that they are their own anti-particles--has since impacted diverse problems ranging from neutrino physics and dark matter searches to the fractional quantum…
In Europe (e.g., in Italy), and in the States, the opinion is widely spreading that the negative consequences of modern progress are the fault of "Science". A lively debate on this topic took place among the famous writer Leonardo Sciascia…
In the space of less than one decade, the search for Majorana quasiparticles in condensed matter has become one of the hottest topics in physics. The aim of this review is to provide a brief perspective of where we are with strong focus on…