Pauli, Wolfgang, 76 decay

Pauli, Wolfgang (1900-58) Austrian-born Swiss theoretical physicist. Pauli is best known for his enunciation of the Pauli exclusion principle in 1925. This enabled the electronic structure of atoms to be understood, particularly how the shell structure of atoms, and hence the periodic table of the elements, comes about. Pauli won the 1945 Nobel Prize for physics for this work. Pauli made many other important contributions to physics including his prediction of the neutrino in beta decay, the incorporation of spin into quantum mechanics, and the explanation of paramagnetism in metals. He also wrote several classic books and reviews on quantum mechanics. 

As a chair at the University of Rome, Fermi did much of his most important work between 1927 and 1938. Along with the English physicist Paul Dirac but independently, he developed quantum-mechanical statistics that measure particles of half-integer spin (now known as fermions) between 1929 and 1932 he reformulated more simply and elegantly Dirac s then recent work on quantum electronics. In 1933-1934, he published a theory of /3-decay that included what became known as the Fermi interaction, Fermi interactions, and the Fermi coupling constant. Fie also theorized and named the neutrino ( little neutral one ), originally hypothesized by Wolfgang Pauli but not detected experimentally until 1956. 

Neutrinos arc stable fermions of spin 4 Three types of neutrinos exist (each has its own antiparticle) electronic, muonic and taonic. The neutrinos are created in the weak interactions (e.g., in /3-decay) and do not participate either in the strong, or in electromagnetic interactions. The latter feature expresses itself in an incredible ability to penetrate matter (e.g., crossing the l arth almost as through a vacuum). The eristence of the electronic neutrino was postulated in 1930 by Wolfgang Pauli and discovered in 1956 by F. Reines and C.L. Cowan the muonic neutrino was discovered in 1962 by L. Lederman, M. Sdiwartz and J. Steinbeiger. 

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