Farewell to Ettore Fiorini
On 9 April, Ettore Fiorini, an internationally renowned scientist who, with his intuitions, projects and commitment, significantly contributed to the institutional and scientific history of INFN, passed away. Fiorini was a professor in our Department for many years and was a Director of the INFN Unit. He was then one of the founders of the Physics Department and of the INFN Unit of Milano Bicocca. He was a member of the Accademia dei Lincei.
In the course of a forty-year career Fiorini has provided fundamental contributions to experimental physics and to the growth and development of INFN research activities as promoter and manager of important experiments, in particular for the study and understanding weak interactions and neutrinos.
“A great protagonist of physics and of the history of INFN leaves us”, comments Antonio Zoccoli, president of INFN. “Thanks to his intelligence, competence and passion, Ettore, during his long career, has in fact been able to provide the impetus for the development of innovative experimental solutions, and to start research lines on which the international physics community is still committed today, demonstrating an uncommon ability to identify promising and effective experimental approaches, being ahead of his times”.
“Endowed with exquisite sympathy and grace as well as great intelligence, Ettore is certainly a legend in the world of science. With him we lose a father of Italian physics who raised many generations of scientists who carry on his legacy”, comments Oliviero Cremonesi, president of INFN Commission 2. “Ettore had a gaze capable of going beyond immediate contingencies and was able to understand the scope of an experiment even in terms of impact on the general public. His guidance, his jokes, his anecdotes and his proverbial intuition as an experimental physicist will be sorely missed. As he himself often liked to recall quoting Anton Tchekhov: when they leave us, we must not say ‘they are no more’ of our life companions, but with gratitude ‘they have been'”.
“Ettore was for many a colleague, a teacher, a friend”, adds Sandra Malvezzi, Director of the INFN Section of Milano Bicocca. “Professor at Milano Statale and then at Milano Bicocca, he has held high-level institutional positions both at universities and at INFN. Without him the INFN Section of Milano Bicocca would not exist. Illustrious physicist, he leaves an imprint and an important legacy in our community. Holder of the ‘real life’ of particle physics research over the decades, he personally contributed to the growth of astroparticle physics, following its developments with great passion.
“Ettore Fiorini was a great scientist: a giant of experimental physics”, underlines Ezio Previtali, director of the INFN Gran Sasso National Laboratories. “Among the many and varied contributions he has made to scientific research, I like to remember that he was one of the initiators of ‘underground’ physics, a staunch supporter of LNGS, which he helped bring about and develop. I had the honor and pleasure of traveling a long stretch of road with him, not only studying particle physics, but also analyzing aspects that only he could identify: from Roman lead to the death of Napoleon Bonaparte. In this sense, Ettore was a forerunner of multidisciplinary scientific research. I will miss his fictional stories, anecdotes and all the discussions, scientific and otherwise, that he always knew how to stimulate. Dear Ettore, thanks for everything.”
Born in Verona on 19 April 1933, after graduating in Milan under the supervision of Giovanni Polvani, Ettore Fiorini got immediately interested in the research topics that would characterize his entire career, dedicating himself to the measurements of cosmic radiation in the high mountains and of double beta decay without neutrino emissions, of which he was one of the precursors as well as father of the Germanium diode technique. The following years saw him engaged in experiments conducted using the new bubble chamber technique, which would allow him to become one of the protagonists of the Gargamelle collaboration at CERN, responsible for the discovery of weak neutral interactions in 1973.
Following the important result achieved with Gargamelle, Fiorini’s tireless curiosity turned towards questions related to the experimental verification of some fundamental properties of nature, such as the lepton and baryonic number, the electric charge or the stability of electrons and nucleons. Thus he proposed an experiment at the INFN National Laboratories of Legnaro to look for the violation of parity in the nuclei and, in the same years, he headed an international collaboration for the realization of an experiment for the research of the decay of the nucleon: NUSEX, in the tunnel of Mont Blanc, one of the first underground experiments. He was aware of the advantages deriving from the possibility of conducting experimental activities for the study of rare events and neutrinos underground, sheltered from the noise produced by the constant rain of cosmic rays hitting the earth’s surface. In 1979 he also became the spokesperson for the project for the of the Gran Sasso National Laboratories, organizing a campaign of site characterization measurements, while the laboratory was still in the excavation phase.
At the beginning of research within the Gran Sasso Laboratories Ettore Fiorini and his working group engaged in GALLEX, an important experiment dedicated to the measurement of solar neutrinos, which ended with the first experimental demonstration of the mechanisms of energy production in the Sun. in the same years he was also the supporter of a proposal which envisages the development and use of very low temperature detectors for the study of double beta decay without neutrino emission, the search for dark matter and the direct measurement of the neutrino mass, which will materialize with the birth of two separate research lines, one for the development of large mass bolometers for the study of double beta decay, the other for the construction of microbolometers for the determination of the neutrino mass. In this context, it was again Fiorini who in 1998 proposed the creation of CUORE, an experiment for the measurement of double beta decay in data taking since 2017 at the Gran Sasso Laboratories.
In the last years of his activity Fiorini has cultivated a passion for archaeometry, born with the recovery of over a thousand ingots of ancient lead from the Roman era, found by a diver in the late 80s off the island of Mal di Ventre in Sardinia. It is thanks to Fiorini’s intuition and intervention that those ingots, characterized by their low radioactivity content, were subsequently used to carry out experiments in the physics of rare events, in particular for the shielding of the experiment CUORE. This experience will be followed by a series of activities straddling historiographical and physical research, such as the one concerning the study of the hair of Napoleon and his contemporaries, to establish whether or not the emperor had been poisoned with arsenic, or such as the measurements of the isotopic ratios of lead to establish the origin of archaeological finds from the nuragic site of Sant’Imbenia.