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Giorgio Salvini, an internationally acclaimed physicist and father of the INFN Frascati Laboratories, the first national laboratory for particle physics, died in his home in Rome at the age of 95. He was born in Milan on 24 April 1920. “An extraordinary protagonist of the rebirth of Italian physics after the tragedy of the diaspora and the war,” recalled Fernando Ferroni, INFN President. “He accepted the task of organising and coordinating the construction of the synchrotron at the Frascati Laboratories while still very young. A machine that was born from the desire to project the National Institute for Nuclear Physics into the excellence of world physics, and which he made reality along with a team of young enthusiasts. In his long and wonderful scientific career, the optimism of will always prevailed and this is a legacy which INFN will try to always treasure,” concluded Ferroni. Salvini’s first significant scientific work was done clandestinely, hidden from his Professor and supervisor Giovanni Polvani, in the rooms of the Institute of Physics of the University of Milan. These were the last years of World War II and Giorgio Salvini was a young lieutenant of the Alpine Corps, surprised like many by the armistice of 1943. It was from this work that Salvini started to get noticed. At that time, he was working on the meson interactions in nuclei, before moving on to deal with cosmic rays. With this line of research he obtained his first success and recognition, the chair and invitation to Princeton by his American colleagues in 1949. In those years he consolidated friendships and important collaborations with other young physicists, such as Gilberto Bernardini, Edoardo Amaldi and Ettore Pancini, and continued to successfully work on cosmic rays and particle detection. On returning to Italy, he taught General Physics and in 1953 was appointed, still very young (just 33 years of age) director of the national project for the construction of a 1,000 MeV electron synchrotron in Frascati. Thus the first of a series of machines that allowed the Frascati National Laboratories of the National Institute for Nuclear Physics to become a leading-edge research centre in the field of high energy physics was born. When Salvini left in 1960, the Laboratories were well developed and had also become an important training centre for the Italian school of accelerator physics which, with AdA collider and the insights of the Austrian physicist Bruno Touschek, opened the new fundamental era of storage rings. From 1966 to 1970 he was President of INFN which, under his guidance, finally obtained full legal autonomy. Having permanently returned to research from the late ‘70s he joined the group which revealed the intermediate W and Z bosons at CERN, discovery for which Carlo Rubbia received the Nobel Prize. He continued to alternate with passion research and prestigious management roles and in 1990 took over from Amaldi as Director of the Lincei Academy and in 1995 was appointed Minister for Universities and Scientific and Technological Research in the Dini government. After this experience, he continued to participate in the Roman and international university life with the same enthusiasm, still simply declaring to be “a lucky man”. Driven by his two constant poles of reference: his scientific curiosity and teaching. “Having arrived at the evening of my life, - said Salvini - I find that I have been a lucky man, for what I have seen and contributed, on a very limited scale, to implement”.

After a two-year break, the LHC, the super particle accelerator of CERN in Geneva, is giving end to the last check before launching its second period of activity, the Run 2, thus restarting its research. Even more powerful, it will achieve energy levels hitherto never explored by physicists in the laboratory. The machine was switched off on 14 February, 2013 to enable work to be carried out that has led to its increase in performance. With a slight delay due to a technical accident occurred in a connection between a magnet and its diode, Run 2 is about to begin. Thus, shortly, the first proton beams will be injected into the 27-kilometre ring of the particle accelerator, while the first particle collisions are expected in the next months. In the enhanced version, the LHC will operate with almost double the energy of its predecessor, reaching 13 TeV at the point of particle collision. This will allow physicists to look for signs of physics beyond the Standard Model, the theory that today represents our best description of nature, of elementary particles and their interactions. It will also be an opportunity to verify theories that in the first stage were impossible to test, from dark matter, to super-symmetry and extra dimensions.

The cultural heritage analysis, preservation and restoration experts have set up a "network" in Italy with IPERION_CH.it, a mobile and integrated task force capable of intervening on works of art, monuments and historical and archaeological finds in situ or in the laboratory, in a non-invasive manner in order to plan the restoration work. The network offers free access to laboratories, portable diagnostic instruments and the technical and scientific skills of interdisciplinary teams of researchers working on selected intervention projects on the cultural heritage. IPERION_CH.it is funded by the Ministry of Education, Universities and Research with the participation of the National Research Council (CNR), which is the coordinator, INFN, the National Materials Science and Technology Inter-University Consortium and, as infrastructure partner, the Opificio delle Pietre Dure (Workshop of Semi-Precious Stones) which offers its expertise in restoration and history of art. The interventions currently planned concern: the Mosaic of Alessandro in the House of the Faun of Pompeii, preserved at the National Archaeological Museum of Naples (in progress); a collection of paintings by Pollock at the Guggenheim Museum in Venice (in progress); the Pala di San Bernardino by Piero della Francesca in the Pinacoteca di Brera in Milan; the Trittico del Maestro dei Fogliami Ricamati in the Polizzi Generosa church (Palermo); a number of works of Italian Pointillism at the National Gallery of Modern Art in Rome; the Encounter of the Pilgrims with Pope Ciriaco by Vittore Carpaccio in the Galleria dell'Accademia in Venice and the murals of the cave church of Sant'Angelo di Casalrotto (Mottola, Taranto). The Italian network is part of a larger project to build a European inter-disciplinary infrastructure for preservation science and technology. (IPERION - Integrated Platform for the European Research Infrastructure ON Culture Heritage). In detail, the newly-born Italian network for cultural heritage, IPERION_CH.it, involves the following: for CNR, Molab-CNR, the mobile laboratory for non-invasive investigation on works of art consisting of the Institute of Molecular Science and Technology (ISTM-CNR), the National Institute of Optics (INO-CNR), the Visual Computing Lab (ISTI-CNR) and the SMAArt Centre of Perugia; for INFN, LABEC, Laboratory of Nuclear Techniques for the Cultural Heritage in Florence, LANDIS, Laboratory of Non-Destructive Analysis of the National Laboratories of the South, the National Laboratories Frascati and the Bari, Bologna, Catania, Ferrara, Florence, Milan Bicocca, Naples, Turin sections; INSTM, the National Materials Science and Technology Inter-University Consortium, bringing together 47 Italian Universities engaged in advanced materials research and related technologies and OPD, the Opificio delle Pietre Dure in Florence, a centre of excellence for the restoration and preservation of the cultural heritage and higher education institute

OPD L’Opificio delle Pietre Dure di Firenze, centro di eccellenza per il restauro e la conservazione dei beni culturali e scuola di alta formazione

At the beginning of March, opened by a lecture from Nobel Laureate Carlo Rubbia, the 16th edition of the biennial meeting International Workshop on Neutrino Telescopes was held. The Conference, organised by the INFN of Padua, in collaboration with the Department of Physics of the University of Padua, was hosted in Venice by the Venetian Institute of Science, Letters and Arts. More than one hundred physicists, most coming from abroad, took part in the workshop in order to outline the state of the art of neutrino physics, a research field from which we expect major progress in the knowledge of our universe. Great importance was given to neutrino telescopes: from the IceCube experiment in the South Pole, to the Km3NeT project, the European initiative promoted by INFN for an underwater observatory in the Mediterranean Sea off Cape Passero, in Sicily. Much of the discussion was also dedicated to the Gran Sasso National Laboratories of INFN, the largest underground laboratory in the world for astroparticle physics research, which hosts, among others, the solar neutrino and "double beta" decay detectors for the study of extremely rare processes and for the search for dark matter. Among the projects of the near future, the large-scale international projects for the study of neutrino oscillation, such as Juno (Jiangmen Underground Neutrino Observatory), in China, LBNF (Long Baseline Neutrino Facility), in the United States and Hyper-Kamiokande in Japan were finally presented. )