Members of the JINR Scientific Council, members of the Committee on JINR-INFN cooperation, DLNP staff members participated in the opening ceremony of the memorial board of the European Physical Society (EPS) at the office of B.M. Pontecorvo on 22 February 2013 at the Dzhelepov Laboratory of Nuclear Problems.

EPS President Luisa Chifarelli (National Institute for Nuclear Research, Italy) opened the ceremony.

If Bruno Pontecorvo were alive today, he undoubtedly would have received the Nobel Prize. He had a lot of ideas – the existence of different types of neutrinos and their oscillations, and these ideas came to him when only one type of neutrino was known.

JINR Director V.A. Matveev characterized Bruno Pontecorvo as an outstanding physicist and a man who made a great contribution to development of the JINR and science in general. A new laureate of the Pontecorvo prize Professor of the University of Milano E. Fiorini attended the opening ceremony:

– I am very proud to receive this award; it is a great honour to me. First, this is a very prestigious award, and secondly, we were friends with Bruno, in spite of the fact that he was much older than me. We met at conferences in the USSR and Eastern Europe. I learned a lot from him and I am not alone – many people learned neutrino physics from Bruno.

From the words on the memorial board: “… His advanced ideas were implemented in 1962 in Brookhaven, and led to the discovery of the muon neutrino. He put forward the idea of the oscillation between neutrinos and antineutrinos In 1957, and between electron and muon neutrinos in 1967… The implication related to the studies of neutrino masses and their mixing opened “the first window” to the physics beyond the Standard Model.”

Correspondent of the JINR weekly newspaper “Dubna: science, community, progress” Olga Tarantina