Enrico Fermi (1901 - 1954) was an Italian-American physicist widely regarded as one of the most influential scientists of the twentieth century and among the last to achieve distinction in both theoretical and experimental physics. He created the world's first artificial nuclear reactor and was awarded the 1938 Nobel Prize in Physics for his demonstrations of induced radioactivity and the discovery of new elements produced by neutron irradiation.[2]
Early life and education
Enrico Fermi was born in Rome on 29 September 1901. A precocious student, he entered the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa and earned his doctorate from the University of Pisa in 1922. In the following years he broadened his training abroad, studying with Max Born at the University of Gottingen and with Paul Ehrenfest at Leiden University.[3]
Rise in Italy
In 1926 Fermi was appointed to a professorship in theoretical physics at the University of Rome, where he assembled a talented group of young researchers. Around this time he developed the quantum statistics governing particles that obey the exclusion principle; such particles are now called fermions in his honor, and the framework is known as Fermi-Dirac statistics. In 1934 he proposed a theory of beta decay that introduced what became known as the weak interaction.
Fermi and his collaborators went on to bombard many elements with neutrons, discovering that slowing the neutrons dramatically increased the reactions they induced. This work produced numerous new radioactive isotopes and earned him the Nobel Prize.
Nobel Prize and emigration
Fermi received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1938. Because Italy's racial laws endangered his wife, Laura, who was Jewish, the family did not return to Rome after the Stockholm ceremony but emigrated to the United States, where he took up a position at Columbia University.[2]
The Manhattan Project
On 2 December 1942, working beneath the stands of the University of Chicago's Stagg Field, Fermi led the team that achieved the first controlled, self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction in the reactor known as Chicago Pile-1. This milestone was a foundation of the wartime Manhattan Project, and Fermi subsequently contributed to the work at Los Alamos that produced the first atomic bombs.[4]
Later life and legacy
After the war Fermi became a professor at the University of Chicago, where he trained a generation of leading physicists and turned increasingly to high-energy physics. He died of stomach cancer in Chicago on 28 November 1954. His name endures widely: element 100, fermium, is named for him, as are the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, the Enrico Fermi Award, and the informal Fermi paradox concerning extraterrestrial life.
