After the medals for Italian sports in Tokyo there is also a medal in Europe for the Italian scientist Alessandra Buonanno. the first Italian to receive the Dirac Medal for her research on gravitational waves, awarded by the Abdus Salam International Center for Theoretical Physics (Ictp). Alessandra at the head of the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics, baptized Albert Einstein Institute, in Potsdam in Germany. the second woman to receive this award was born in 1985. The first in 2000 was an Australian. Together the same recognition was awarded to the physicists Thibault Damour, Frans Pretorius and Saul Teukolsky.
Studies
Alessandra Buonanno (born in 1968) studied physics in Pisa and, after an experience at CERN in Geneva, she carried out research first in France and then at the University of Maryland, in the United States. In Germany he was part of the group that with the American scientists was chasing gravitational waves with the two Ligo stations. In parallel, physicists from the Virgo station of Pisa of the National Institute of Nuclear Physics also collaborated on the discovery. The theoretical work of this year’s Dirac Medals was instrumental in interpreting the observations made by Ligo, an extremely sophisticated experiment, ICTP director Atish Dabholkar said, announcing the award winners.
Gravitational waves
The Italian scientist, in fact, was among the protagonists of the development of the sophisticated algorithms necessary for the interpretation of the signals that testified to the passage of gravitational waves on the Earth detected by the antennas in 2015 and announced the following year, confirming the theory developed by Albert Einstein a century. first. After the discovery, numerous awards have underlined the precious work done by Alessandra Buonanno up to the prestigious Medal that commemorates the Nobel Prize winner Paul Dirac, one of the founders of quantum mechanics.
August 9, 2021 (change August 9, 2021 | 16:05)
© Time.News