Oreste Piccioni

Who was Oreste Piccioni?

Oreste Piccioni was an Italian-American physicist who made important contributions to elementary particle physics during the early years of its history. He was a graduate student of Enrico Fermi at the University of Rome, receiving his doctorate in 1938. Remaining in Italy during World War II, he did fundamental research under difficult conditions in the basement of a high school, which first clarified the nature of the muon.

In 1946 he emigrated to the United States, where he worked first at MIT with Bruno Rossi, and then at BNL's Cosmotron, developing faster nuclear electronics and essential techniques for extracting, transporting, and focusing beams of high energy particles. Later at UC Berkeley's Lawrence Radiation laboratory he was a codiscover of the antineutron in 1955 at the Bevatron. His important contributions to the design of the experiment that discovered the antiproton in 1955 were acknowledged in the 1959 ceremony in which the Nobel Prize in physics was awarded to E. Segrè and O. Chamberlain. Unfortunately a famous quarrel over credit and priority for the discovery embittered Piccioni for much of his later life, to the point that he filed a lawsuit in 1972 against Segrè and Chamberlain, seeking damages and public acknowledgment of his contributions. The suit was ultimately dismissed as filed too late for consideration of the issues.