Segrè, Emilio

Segrè, Emilio, 1905–89, Italian-American physicist, Ph.D. Univ. of Rome, 1928. Segrè was a professor at the Univ. of Rome (1932–36), a researcher at the Univ. of California, Berkeley (1936–43), and group leader in the Los Alamos Laboratory of the Manhattan Project (1943–46). In 1946 he returned to Berkeley, where he remained on the faculty until his retirement in 1972. Segrè and Owen Chamberlain shared the 1959 Nobel Prize in Physics for producing and identifying the antiproton, a subatomic particle identical to the proton but with a negative electrical charge. Their 1955 finding set the stage for the discovery of many additional antiparticles, and antiprotons have since become an integral part of high-energy physics experiments.

The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, 6th ed. Copyright © 2024, Columbia University Press. All rights reserved.

See more Encyclopedia articles on: Physics: Biographies