The prestigious International Prize "Bruno Pontecorvo" 2016 was awarded to the Italian physicist Gianpaolo Bellini.
The Yury members were Samoil Bilenky, Luciano Maiani, Arthur McDonald (Nobel Prize 2015), Alexander Olshevskiy (chair), Yoichiro Suzuki, with the following motivations: “…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”.Emeritus Scientist of the italian National Institute of Nuclear Physics (INFN) and Full Professor (now retired) at the University of Milan, Bellini is an experimental physicist of the Elementary Particle and Astroparticle Physics.
Since 1990, Bellini has designed, installed in the Gran Sasso Laboratory and managed as spokesman during more than 20 years, the Borexino experiment, unique in the world for its ever achieved radio-purity, able to measure neutrinos from very low energies. BOREXINO has measured for the first time: the solar luminosity through neutrinos (result nominated among the "Top Ten Breakthroughs 2014" by the British Institute of Physics), the neutrino oscillation in vacuum regime, the solar fluxes from all nuclear reactions active in the Sun, confirming the Solar Standard Model predictions, and measured the geo-neutrinos with a evidence of more than 99.9999993% of probability.
Currently BOREXINO is working to get a new important measure concerning the massive stars and to test the existence of a fourth neutrino (sterile neutrino).