Friday September 13, 2016 the presence of the Council of the Joint Institute of Nuclear Research in Dubna (J.I.N.R.), Prof. V.A. Mateev, Director of J.I.N.R
has given to Gianpaolo Bellini the Bruno Pontecorvo Prize 2016 which has been awarded by an International Committee for the following reasons:
“For his outstanding contributions to the development of low-energy neutrino detection methods, their realization in the Borexino detector, and the important solar and geo-neutrino results obtained in this experiment”. The Committee was composed of Art McDonald (Nobel Prize 2015), Yoichiro Suzuki (spokesman of the experiment SuperKamiokande), Luciano Maiani, Alexander Olshevski.
This award, one of the most prestigious in the field of Physics is awarded to scientists who have contributed with very important breaktroughs to the Particle Physics and in particular to the Neutrino Physics.
The experiment BOREXINO, chaired by Gianpaolo Bellini from 1990 to 2011, has demonstrated that the Sun operates according to a cycle of nuclear reactions by measuring the flows of the emitted neutrinos and showed the Sun stability at 105
time scale. In addition BOREXINO reached for the first time evidence of the phenomenon of neutrino oscillation in vacuum, by measuring the ratio between the survival probability of survival in a vacuum and in matter of the electron neutrino.