Luigi Giulotto (1911-1986)

Luigi Giulotto was born in Mantova on May 23, 1911, son of Virgilio, a Mathematics high school teacher and of Elisabetta Perini. He attended the Liceo Classico in Bergamo and the Physics Course in Pavia, as alumnus of Borromeo College. [GoTo MP3 File]

He took his Physics degree in 1933, discussing a thesis on the photovoltaic effect in CuO2 with Piatti. Formerly assistant of Alessandro Amerio in Milano, he came back to Pavia in 1935 as assistant of Adolfo Campetti.

In 1942 he took the "Libera Docenza" in Experimental Physics. In the spring of 1943, he was called up in the Army and the day of September, 8, 1943 caught him on service in Pavia's streets: he suggested to his soldiers to go home. Some days after, he escaped, with his brother Alessandro in Swizterland where he stayed till the end of the war. In Swizterland, he was among the teachers of the courses organized for Italian refugees.

In 1949, he became full Professor of "Fisica Superiore" in Pavia; in 1960 he switched to "Fisica Generale". He was director of the "Istituto di Fisica Superiore" from 1949 to 1960 and of the "Istituto di Fisica Generale" from 1960 to 1980.

Giulotto died in Pavia, on September 13, 1986 after having been hit by a stroke in November 1984.

Giulotto has been attracted by Physics in his youth. In his early teens, he studied Physics by himself on the textbook by Oreste Murani; he liked also to build electrical circuits (among them a working radio system).

Excellent experimental physicist, he found in Piero Caldirola a theoretician very sensitive to unsolved or puzzling problems. From the discussions with Caldirola, stemmed the researches on the Raman effect and, later, on the Ha line of Hydrogen.

There was the feeling that the two levels 2S1/2 and 2P1/2 of the Hydrogen atom did not have the same energy, in spite of the quantum-relativistic theory by Dirac. Giulotto began to work on the subject in 1942, but owing to the war events, the research was completed only in 1947. The measurements were painstaiking, owing to the necessity of long exposures of the photographic plate. The last paraghraph of short note published in the Physical Review begins by this statement:

If in the experimental measurements a mysterious systematic error does not occur, we should conclude, in accord with C. R. Williams' observations, that the separation between the components do not correspond exactly to the calculated ones on the basis of Dirac's theory.

Meanwhile, W. Lamb and R. Retherford were able to observe directly the transition between the two levels 2P1/2 and 2S1/2 by using a microwave beam of suitable wavelength, showing that the former is lower that the latter: the theoretical explanation came soon after from quantum electrodynamics. For having discovered the so-called Lamb-shift, Lamb was awarded the Nobel prize in 1955.

Soon after the war, Giulotto began to work on nuclear magnetic resonance, firstly discovered in 1946 by Bloch and Purcell (independently); the first results have been obtained by an apparatus made up with war surplus found at a popular market in Milano (1947) [GoTo MP3 File]. The further development of this pioneering work brought Giulotto and his coworkers - for some years - in the core of the mainstream of nuclear magnetic resonance research.

In the mid of the fifties, Giulotto began, under the auspices of Caldirola, a collaboration with Fausto Fumi, a Solid State theoretician who had spent some years in England and in the United States. The project was ambitious: combine the experimental skill of Giulotto (he had "golden hands", as Caldirola told me in an interview) with the theoretical backgrounds of Fumi. The fate was very different. The characters of the two men were too much different: the separation was inevitable. However, during the short period of collaboration a bunch of young people were attracted to work on Solid State Physics, both on experimental and theoretical side: Roberto Fieschi, Franco Bassani and Mario Tosi (theory); Gianfranco Chiarotti and the late Paolo Camagni (experiment). All of them - their scientific achievements apart - have given relevant contributions to the diffusion of Solid State research in Italy.

After Fermi's departure for the United States, his heritage (scientific, methodological and financial) has been taken up by Edoardo Amaldi. In the years of the reconstruction of the country, in a context of general weakness of the scientific structures and of increasing interest in the applications of nuclear research for energy production, Amaldi was able in inserting the research on fundamental particles into the stream of applied nuclear research. The outcome was an unequal development of the various branches of Physics and of Physics (or better, a part of it) with respect the other experimental disciplines. The creation of the INFN (Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare - National Institute of Nuclear Physics) in 1951 and its subsequent independent financial support assured by a law (1971) constituted, for its structure, its autonomy and its budget, a privileged exception in the horizon of Italian research.

Starting from the sixties, Giulotto began a long lasting activity aiming at an equilibrated development of physical researches: the Physics of the Matter, whose technological outcome was of strategic relevance, was badly underdeveloped.

However, Giulotto commitment, though based on a correct analysis and sustained by an ambitious goal - to obtain what will be later called INFM (National Institute for the Physics of Matter) - has been hampered by tactical errors and resentful polemics. The path has been difficult and perilous: as a matter of fact, the INFM was founded only in 1994.

Bibliography.

The scientific papers of L. Giulotto have been published in: La Fisica a Pavia nell'800 e '900 - Scritti di Luigi Giulotto, Milano, 1987.

Giulotto's scientific activity is discussed in : G. Bonera, A. Rigamonti, 'Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopy in Pavia under Luigi Giulotto: 1945-1960', in: G. Giuliani (ed), The Origins of Solid State Physics in Italy: 1945-1960, Bologna (1988), 49-65.

For the period in Switzerland, see: R. Broggini, Terra d'asilo - I rifugiati italiani in Svizzera, 1943- 1945, Bologna (1993), 543-548.

(G.G)

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