Giacinto Scoles

Who is Giacinto Scoles?

Giacinto Scoles is a European and North American chemist and physicist who is best known for his pioneering development of molecular beam methods for the study of weak van der Waals forces between atoms, molecules, and surfaces. He developed the cryogenic bolometer as a universal detector of atomic and molecule beams that not only can detect a small flux of molecules, but also responds to the internal energy of the molecules. This is the bases for the optothermal spectroscopy technique which Scoles and others have used to obtain very high signal-to noise and high resolution ro-vibrational spectra.

Scoles was born in Italy and raised there through the Second World War. A few years after the war he moved, with his family, to Spain, where Scoles spent his adolescence. He returned to Italy and graduated the University of Genoa in 1959 with a degree in Chemistry. His publication record started with “Vapour Pressure of Isotopic Liquids I” published 1959 in Il Nuovo Cimento. Starting his interdisciplinary research between chemistry and physics, in 1960 he was appointed Assistant Professorship in the Physics Department of the University of Genoa where he taught a lab course and conducted experiments on isotope separation during physical adsorption.−14