Ettore Pancini

Ettore Pancini
Born	10 August 1915 Stanghella
Died	2 September 1981 Venice
Nationality	italian
Scientific career
Fields	Physics

Ettore Pancini (10 August 1915, in Stanghella, Kingdom of Italy – 2 September 1981, in Venice, Italy) was an italian physicist and partigian.

History

Early life

He was the second son of Giulio Pancini and Maria Galeazzi; his father was an engineer for the Venice municipality and a member of an old Friulian family from Varmo, Udine. He had an older brother, Mario Pancini, an engineer at SADE, and a sister, Irene. He completed his early education in Venice, but due to his spirited nature, his parents enrolled him in the Nunziatella Military School in Naples, where he earned a classical high school diploma. Afterward, he returned to Padua and began studying mathematics at the city’s university but switched to physics after his first year.

As an experimental physicist, he graduated in 1938 under Bruno Rossi and became an assistant to Gilberto Bernardini in Rome in 1940. Drafted in February 1941 as a second lieutenant in anti-aircraft artillery, Pancini balanced wartime responsibilities with research on cosmic rays and participation in the resistance. During a brief leave in the winter of 1942-43, he conducted studies at Plateau Rosa with Bernardini and Oreste Piccioni.

Resistence period

Following the Armistice of Cassibile, he joined the Paduan resistance, where he became a commander of a GAP unit and a key figure in the PCI within the CLN of Veneto. In 1944, he was appointed commander of the partisan action groups in Venice.

Postwar Achievements

In 1945, after moving from the Institute of Physics in Padua to the one in Rome, he participated in the concluding phase of the landmark Conversi-Pancini-Piccioni (CPP) experiment. This work overturned previous results obtained by Conversi and Piccioni using the same apparatus, ultimately leading to a pivotal discovery: the muon, a particle found in cosmic rays, was not the mediator of Strong Interactions as previously believed. This breakthrough marked the birth of high-energy physics and earned him five nominations for the Nobel Prize in Physics.

In 1947, to advance research on cosmic rays at high altitudes, he collaborated with Gilberto Bernardini and Claudio Longo to design and construct the Testa Grigia Laboratory in the Aosta Valley, situated at 3,480 meters above sea level. He directed this facility from 1949 to 1952. Subsequently, in 1952, he was appointed professor of physics at the University of Genoa, and in 1961, he transferred to the University of Naples. After the 10th Congress of the Soviet Communist Party in 1956, where Khrushchev publicly criticized Stalin's regime, he began distancing himself from the PCI. This withdrawal was subtle and reflective. His personal life, however, was marked by tragedy: his brother Mario committed suicide on November 24, 1968, five years after the Vajont disaster, consumed by remorse. Their mother, blind and financially destitute, passed away shortly after, on April 16, 1969.

By 1969, he formally severed ties with the Italian Communist Party and joined the Manifesto group. He later ran in the 1979 parliamentary elections and the 1980 regional elections as a candidate for Proletarian Democracy. He played a significant role in revitalizing Italian experimental physics following the dissolution of the renowned School of Rome. This period of revival, characterized by limited resources but remarkable ingenuity, is vividly described by Giovanni Boato, one of his collaborators in Genoa:

Pancini had become a supporter of the fact that the devices had to be built entirely in-house, because... to do good experimental research you need to know how the devices are made and therefore not buy them.

In 1941 he married Elda Rupil and had four children: Barbara, Alessandra, Giulio and Alice.

Honors

With the rectoral decree 3452 of 12 October 2015, the physics department of the University of Naples Federico II took the new name of "Ettore Pancini" physics department in his honor.

External links

• Barimboldi, Leonardo (2014). "PANCINI, Ettore". treccani.it (in Italian).
• "Ettore Pancini". anpi.it (in Italian).
• "La preistoria del muone". phys.uniroma1.it. Archived from the original on 2020-09-28.