Related papers: Majorana: from atomic and molecular, to nuclear ph…
In recent years, the italian theoretical Nuclear Physics community has played a leading role in the development of a unified approach, allowing for a consistent and fully quantitative description of the nuclear response to electromagnetic…
An account is given on the first studies on the physics of ammonia, focusing on the infrared spectra of that molecule. Relevant contributions from several authors, in the years until 1932, are pointed out, discussing also an unknown study…
We give a detailed account of the recent retrieval of a consistent amount (about 600 pages) of documents written by Enrico Fermi and/or his collaborators, coming from different sources previously unexplored. These documents include…
The conceptual bases of Fermi's $\beta$-ray theory (at its 90th anniversary) are examined, highlighting the innovative drive and inspirational role for the progress that followed just afterwards. Moreover, the three different ideas of the…
The history of weak interactions starting with Fermi's creation of the beta decay theory and culminating in its modern avatar in the form of the electroweak gauge theory is described. Discoveries of parity violation, matter-antimatter…
Quantum electrodynamics is the well-accepted theory. However, we feel it is useful to look at formalisms that provide alternative ways to describe light, because in the recent years the development of quantum field theories based primarily…
Sicily has played an important role in the development of the new research area named "Econophysics". In fact some key ideas supporting this new hybrid discipline were originally formulated in a pioneering work of the Sicilian born…
Aim of this paper is to retrace the path that led the young Enrico Fermi to write his paper on the statistics of an ideal monatomic gas. This discovery originated in his interest, which he had shown since his formative years, in the…
We develop the search strategy for a heavy Majorana neutrino via the lepton number violation signal process $p\, e^- \to \mu^+ jjj$ at future electron-proton colliders. The signal and dominant standard model background events are generated…
The mentioned article was written by Ettore Majorana, in a partially educational way, for a journal of Sociology; but he gave up publishing it (and threw it away). It appeared posthumous, thanks to Giovanni Gentile Jr. (the inventor of…
The nuclear method to discover Majorana neutrinos is the neutrinoless double $ \beta $ decay. An interesting alternative is offered by the inverse process, neutrinoless radiative double electron capture, accompanied by a photon emission.…
Quantum Monte Carlo methods have proven to be valuable in the study of strongly correlated quantum systems, particularly nuclear physics and cold atomic gases. Historically, such ab initio simulations have been used to study properties of…
We retrace the first steps towards understanding neutrinos, particles predicted by Pauli in 1930 to avoid a supposed violation of time-translation symmetry. Despite the tendency to reduce the whole story to his intuition and the skill of…
(abridged) The physical mechanisms that make a neutrino with standard-model (SM) weak interactions a "lepton-number conservation (LNC) violating" neutrino such as the Majorana neutrino are analysed in a basis of two Majorana states that…
We analyze in some detail the course of Theoretical Physics held by Ettore Majorana at the University of Naples in 1938, just before his mysterious disappearance. In particular we present the recently discovered "Moreno Paper", where all…
This is a somewhat modified version of Chapter 15 of the book "The Physics of Ettore Majorana", by Salvatore Esposito with contributions by Evgeny Akhmedov (Ch. 15) and Frank Wilczek (Ch. 14), Cambridge University Press, 2014.
We analyze in some detail the course of Theoretical Physics held by Ettore Majorana at the University of Naples in 1938, just before his mysterious disappearance. In particular we give an account of the recently retrieved "Moreno Paper",…
We discuss selectron pair production in e- e- scattering. These processes can only occur via t-channel neutralino exchange, provided that the neutralinos are Majorana fermions. We concentrate on the processes e- e- -> e^~_L e^~_L,e^~_R…
We discuss the structure of the Dirac equation and how the nilpotent and the Majorana operators arise naturally in this context. This provides a link between Kauffman's work on discrete physics, iterants and Majorana Fermions and the work…
A concise discussion of spin-1/2 field equations with a special focus on Majorana spinors is presented. The Majorana formalism which describes massive neutral fermions by the help of two-component or four-component spinors is of fundamental…