Fermi

Author: Xie Zunxiu
Publisher:
Publish Date: 1998-10-01
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Principal of Peking University, Zhao Yulin Secretary, Dong Lingsheng
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Principal of Tsinghua University, Zhao Qinggang
Giants are the elite of humanity, they have made outstanding contributions to the progress and civilization of human society, their spirit of struggle and superhuman achievements are deeply admired, becoming models for people to learn from. Giants are human, not gods, they come from ordinary people but surpass them. Lofty ideals, the belief of seeking happiness for the motherland and humanity, are the driving force behind their relentless progress and fearlessness of difficulties.
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Principal of Fudan University, Cao Tianren
Enrico Fermi, an Italian-American physicist, is undoubtedly one of the greatest Italian scientists since Galileo and one of the most creative physicists in the world between 1925 and 1950. Fermi won the 1938 Nobel Prize in Physics for "the discovery of new radioactive substances and the discovery of the selective absorption of slow neutrons." Fermi was born on September 29, 1901, in Rome. He was intelligent and quick-witted, showing great talent from an early age, and was admitted to the Normal School in Pisa in 1918. He later graduated from the University of Pisa and received a doctorate in philosophy in 1924. After spending some time in G?ttingen and Leiden, he returned to Italy and was appointed as a physics professor at the University of Rome, undoubtedly due to the reputation he had already established with about 30 important papers and the support of Senator Corbino, one of the most outstanding physicists in Italy at the time. Fermi began his career as a modern physics textbook, "Introduction to Atomic Physics," and soon attracted the best young physicists in Italy to his circle. However, the rise of Italian fascism led to the exodus of Italian scientific talent. By 1938, Fermi was forced to move to the United States because his wife was Jewish. Before leaving Italy, Fermi had already become an astonishingly productive scientist during his time in Rome, making significant contributions in both theory and experiments. His experimental work stemmed from attempts to advance the work of the Joliot-Curie couple, who had already shown in 1934 that bombarding boron and aluminum with helium nuclei (α particles) would produce artificial radioactive isotopes. Fermi thought that the neutron discovered by James Chadwick in 1932 might be a better tool for creating new isotopes. Although lighter than α particles, neutrons are electrically neutral, which allows them to overcome the positive charge of a target nucleus without consuming the neutron's energy. Fermi reported that in 1934, he impulsively inserted paraffin between the neutron source and the target, placing it in front of the incident neutrons. The result was an increase in activation intensity by tens to hundreds of times. This was Fermi's accidental discovery of slow neutrons. The production of slow neutrons later had a profound impact on both civilian and military nuclear energy. However, Fermi's direct task was to irradiate as many elements as possible with slow neutrons, producing and studying a large number of newly created radioactive isotopes and their properties. During the systematic irradiation of various elements, Fermi and his colleagues naturally bombarded uranium with slow neutrons. This inevitably led to nuclear fission, and Fermi called the newly produced transuranic elements "ausoninum" and "hesperium." In 1938, Otto Hahn and Lise Meitner were the first to realize that nuclear fission was occurring in such reactions. In theory, Fermi's main achievement during his time in Rome was his theory of β decay. This is a process in unstable nuclei where a neutron transforms into a proton, emitting an electron and an antineutrino. Fermi made a detailed analysis, introducing a new force in science, known as the "weak" force. After coming to the United States, Fermi was eager to create a controlled chain reaction. In 1942, he successfully built the first atomic pile on the Stagg Field at the University of Chicago. He and his colleagues used pure graphite as a moderator to slow down neutrons and enriched uranium as fissile material to begin building the reactor. On December 2, 1942, at 2:20 PM, Fermi's reactor reached criticality, sustaining a self-sustaining chain reaction for 28 minutes, marking the beginning of the atomic age. In July 1945, when the first experimental atomic bomb exploded in the desert of New Mexico, Fermi was also present. It is said that when the wind blew in his face, he dropped some paper scraps and calculated the bomb's equivalent power to be 1 ton of TNT. After the war, Fermi served as a physics professor at the University of Chicago until his death from cancer. In physics, various ways are used to commemorate him: the 100th element is named "fermion"; the unit of length 10^-13 cm is called the "fermi"; and the National Accelerator Laboratory near Chicago is named the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory.