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Concept
Ettore Majorana
Summary
Ettore Majorana (maɪə'rɑːnə, ˈɛttore majoˈraːna; born on 5 August 1906 – likely dying in or after 1959) was an Italian theoretical physicist who worked on neutrino masses. On 25 March 1938, he disappeared under mysterious circumstances after purchasing a ticket to travel by ship from Palermo to Naples.
The Majorana equation and Majorana fermions are named after him. In 2006, the Majorana Prize was established in his memory.
In 1938, Enrico Fermi was quoted as saying about Majorana: "There are several categories of scientists in the world; those of second or third rank do their best but never get very far. Then there is the first rank, those who make important discoveries, fundamental to scientific progress. But then there are the geniuses, like Galilei and Newton. Majorana was one of these."
Majorana was born in Catania, Sicily. Mathematically gifted, he was very young when he joined Enrico Fermi's team in Rome as one of the "Via Panisperna boys", who took their name from the street address of their laboratory. Majorana's uncle Quirino Majorana also was a physicist. He began his university studies in engineering in 1923, but switched to physics in 1928 at the urging of Emilio Segrè. Majorana's first papers dealt with problems in atomic spectroscopy.
Majorana's first paper, published in 1928, was written when he was an undergraduate and it was coauthored by Giovanni Gentile, Jr., a junior professor at the Institute of Physics in Rome. This work was an early quantitative application to atomic spectroscopy of Fermi's statistical model of atomic structure (now known as the Thomas–Fermi model, due to its contemporaneous description by Llewellyn Thomas).
In this paper, Majorana and Gentile performed first-principles calculations within the context of this model that gave a good account of experimentally-observed core electron energies of gadolinium and uranium, and of the fine structure splitting of caesium lines observed in optical spectra.
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