(24 February 2016) After Ugo Amaldi, Antonino Zichichi, Luciano Maiani and Ettore Fiorini, another Italian scientist receives the international prize “Bruno Pontecorvo”, awarded annually by the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research (JINR) in Dubna. This 2016 edition saw the award go to Italian physicist Gianpaolo Bellini. The jury – presided by Alexander Olshevskiy and formed by Samoil Bilenky, Luciano Maiani (Pontecorvo Prize winner in 2014), Arthur McDonald (Nobel Prize 2015) and Yoichiro Suzuki – awarded the prize “for [Bellini’s] outstanding contributions to development of detection methods of low-energy neutrinos, their realization in the Borexino detector and the important results on solar neutrinos and geo-neutrinos obtained from this experiment.” Scientist Emeritus of the National Institute of Nuclear Physics (INFN) and former professor at the University of Milan, Bellini is an experimental physicist specialized in elementary particle and astroparticle physics. Since 1990, he established and led in the INFN National Laboratories of Gran Sasso the BOREXINO experiment, for which he was a spokesperson for more than twenty years. Borexino is a unique experiment for its unmatched radiopurity, which measures neutrinos and their lowest energy levels. (Red)
