He was on hand when the X-10 Graphite Reactor at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, went critical in 1943, and when the B Reactor at the Hanford Site did so the next year. Fermi led the team at the University of Chicago that designed and built Chicago Pile-1, which went critical on 2 December 1942, demonstrating the first human-created, self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction. He emigrated to the United States, where he worked on the Manhattan Project during World War II. Although he was awarded the Nobel Prize for this discovery, the new elements were later revealed to be nuclear fission products.įermi left Italy in 1938 to escape new Italian racial laws that affected his Jewish wife, Laura Capon. After bombarding thorium and uranium with slow neutrons, he concluded that he had created new elements. Through experiments inducing radioactivity with the recently discovered neutron, Fermi discovered that slow neutrons were more easily captured by atomic nuclei than fast ones, and he developed the Fermi age equation to describe this. His theory, later referred to as Fermi's interaction and now called weak interaction, described one of the four fundamental interactions in nature. Fermi took up this idea, developing a model that incorporated the postulated particle, which he named the " neutrino". Pauli later postulated the existence of an uncharged invisible particle emitted along with an electron during beta decay, to satisfy the law of conservation of energy. Today, particles that obey the exclusion principle are called " fermions". After Wolfgang Pauli formulated his exclusion principle in 1925, Fermi followed with a paper in which he applied the principle to an ideal gas, employing a statistical formulation now known as Fermi–Dirac statistics. He made significant contributions to the development of statistical mechanics, quantum theory, and nuclear and particle physics.įermi's first major contribution involved the field of statistical mechanics.
With his colleagues, Fermi filed several patents related to the use of nuclear power, all of which were taken over by the US government. Fermi was awarded the 1938 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on induced radioactivity by neutron bombardment and for the discovery of transuranium elements. He was one of very few physicists to excel in both theoretical physics and experimental physics.
He has been called the "architect of the nuclear age" and the "architect of the atomic bomb". Enrico Fermi ( Italian: 29 September 1901 – 28 November 1954) was an Italian and later naturalized American physicist and the creator of the world's first nuclear reactor, the Chicago Pile-1.
0 kommentar(er)
