Alexei Smirnov, a scientist with ICTP’s High Energy Physics Section, is a co-recipient of the 2005 Bruno Pontecorvo Prize. Smirnov is being honoured “for his prediction and study of the influence of matter on neutrino oscillations, now known as the MSW (Mikheyev-Smirnov-Wolfenstein) effect.” The prize ceremony took place at the XXXIII International Conference on High Energy Physics (ICHEP 2006) in Moscow, where Smirnov shared the prize with Stanislav Mikheyev, Institute for Nuclear Research, Moscow, and Lincoln Wolfenstein, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA. The Joint Institute for Nuclear Research (JINR) and Dzhelepov Laboratory of Nuclear Problems in Dubna, Russia, established the Pontecorvo Prize in 1995 to honour distinguished scientists for the most significant investigations in elementary particle physics. Previous recipients include Art McDonald, Director of the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory (SNO); Yoji Totsuka, Director General, High Energy Accelerator Research Organization (KEK), Japan; and Academician Georgi Zatsepin, JINR.
Bruno Pontecorvo was a distinguished Italian-born scientist, who served as an assistant of Nobel Laureate Enrico Fermi at La Sapienza University in Rome in the early 1930s. He emigrated to the Soviet Union in 1950, where he continued his research on the decay of the muon and on neutrinos.