Early and personal life Majorana was born in
Catania,
Sicily. Majorana's uncle
Quirino Majorana was also a physicist. Mathematically gifted, Majorana began his university studies in
engineering in 1923, but switched to
physics in 1928 at the urging of
Emilio Segrè. He was very young when he joined
Enrico Fermi's team in
Rome as one of the "
Via Panisperna boys", who took their name from the street address of their laboratory. Majorana was an enthusiastic and devout
Catholic.
First published academic papers Majorana's first
papers dealt with problems in
atomic spectroscopy. His first paper, published in 1928, was written when he was an undergraduate and it was coauthored by Giovanni Gentile, Jr., a junior professor at the Institute of Physics in Rome. This work was an early quantitative application to atomic spectroscopy of Fermi's statistical model of atomic structure (now known as the
Thomas–Fermi model, due to its contemporaneous description by
Llewellyn Thomas). In this paper, Majorana and Gentile performed first-principles calculations within the context of this model that gave a good account of experimentally-observed core electron energies of
gadolinium and
uranium, and of the fine structure splitting of
caesium lines observed in optical spectra. In 1931, Majorana published the first paper on the phenomenon of
autoionization in atomic spectra, which he called "spontaneous ionization"; an independent paper in the same year, published by
Allen Shenstone of
Princeton University, called it "auto-ionization", a name first used by
Pierre Auger. This name, without the hyphen, has since become the conventional term for the phenomenon. Majorana earned his
Laurea in physics at the
University of Rome La Sapienza in 1929. In 1932, he published a paper in the field of atomic spectroscopy concerning the behaviour of aligned atoms in time-varying magnetic fields. This problem, also studied by
I. I. Rabi and others, led to development of an important sub-branch of atomic physics, that of radio-frequency spectroscopy. In the same year, Majorana published his paper on a relativistic theory of particles with arbitrary intrinsic momentum, in which he developed and applied infinite dimensional representations of the
Lorentz group, and gave a theoretical basis for the mass spectrum of elementary particles. Like most of Majorana's papers, written in Italian, it languished in relative obscurity for several decades. Experiments in 1932 by
Irène Joliot-Curie and
Frédéric Joliot showed the existence of an unknown particle that they suggested was a
gamma ray. Majorana was the first to interpret correctly the experiment as requiring a new particle that had a neutral charge and a mass about the same as the
proton; this particle is the
neutron.
Fermi advised him to write an article on the topic, but Majorana did not.
James Chadwick proved the existence of the neutron by experiment later that year, and he was awarded the
Nobel Prize for this discovery. Majorana was known for not seeking credit for his discoveries, considering his work to be trivial. He wrote only nine papers in his lifetime.
Work with Heisenberg and Bohr "At Fermi's urging, Majorana left Italy early in 1933 on a grant from the National Research Council. In
Leipzig, Germany, he met
Werner Heisenberg. In letters he subsequently wrote to Heisenberg, Majorana revealed that he had found in him, not only a scientific colleague, but a warm personal friend." implying that such measures were necessary to make room for a new generation. Majorana wrote: Professor of Italian Joseph Francese contends that
Leonardo Sciascia's narrative regarding Majorana's disappearance is primarily a literary construct designed to stimulate debate over the ethical responsibilities of scientists rather than an accurate historical account. According to Francese, the story of Majorana's disappearance was a later dramatization by Sciascia that obscured the fact that Majorana was actively involved in the nationalist politics of the 1930s. ==Disappearance==