The INFN Southern National Laboratories, a center of excellence for research and experimentation in the field of nuclear physics to investigate the origin of the Universe, read its history, but also to imagine systems and methods to facilitate life. The Southern Laboratories are located in Catania, one of the four national laboratories of the National Institute of Nuclear Physics (INFN, established in 1976).
Since August 2019, they have been directed by Santo Gammino, who illustrates the numerous activities of the institute, the organization of work as well as the various areas of application of the research carried out here. INFN has always worked well because management is shared and the levels of competence and governance mix - he says. The specificity of the institution is that of having a management that is made up entirely of researchers: physicists of the institution or university professors in charge of research. There is a strong sense of belonging ".
A community that is not only scientific, therefore, where continuity in management is required by the type of activity carried out. "We can never speak of discontinuity on programs because they are long-term projects - explains Gammino - ten-year or multi-year, for which a director carries out initiatives initiated by others, as well as the things I am starting up he will bring them to an end. somebody else. Also in this case, the sense of belonging is high: the older ones work for the young. And it is this sense of belonging that has allowed the institution to develop large companies which then developed over decades ". A Research Center in which "the individual does not count", reiterates Gammino, whose activity is summarized in the scientific commissions in which it is developed.
"It is through these commissions that the mission of the institution develops," he explains. "Our organization makes use of commissions that define the scientific lines of the body, in agreement with the executive committee. In all of them there is full representation and in all of them there are researchers: in short, none are administrative expressions ".
"Of course - he continues - we take on a certain amount of bureaucracy, but we have always been very jealous of our prerogatives that all governments, over the years, have recognized as one of the reasons why INFN works well, uses taxpayers' money well and brings results which, as is well known, are of international level ".
“The national scientific commission - he explains further - not only makes the scientific evaluation of all the projects that are presented by the researchers, but also makes funding proposals to the president, who then the council can accept or file. “We always get to the full satisfaction of well-motivated requests - he adds. This is also the strength of our institution, where ideas are valid and we work in community. We all want to ensure the highest scientific level to our work ".
The commissions deal with different areas. One deals with particle physics with accelerators. "To be clear - the director continues - it is the work that is done at CERN in Geneva rather than in the large American and Japanese laboratories, with very high energy accelerators that investigate the mysteries of the first minutes of the Universe. Those who go to try to understand the intimate structure, the one that our masters, Fermi, Majorana, up to Amaldi, have outlined and which, after the war, has had a great growth to which the Italians have made a decisive contribution. Suffice it to say that the Italians were protagonists in the discovery of the Higgs boson in the 21st century and much more in the 20th ".
The commission that deals with theoretical physics is the one “which, in large part - explains Gammino - outlined the rules of the game with which the experiments of commission one were designed. The Nobel prize for Giorgio Parisi is the success of an entire community and INFN has been central to the development of this research ". Another commission deals with astroparticle physics, without accelerators. "She is the one who tries to reveal the secrets of the remote Universe. The most striking result was obtained with the discovery of gravitational waves. One of the key projects of our laboratories is KM3NeT ”.
“It is now 23 years old - says the director - and is based on a series of detectors placed 3500 meters below sea level off the coast of Portopalo. We have obtained technologically and scientifically important results after years of sacrifices. As my goal at the end of the mandate, there is to strengthen what has been done in the last year and start a new phase to complete this detector in the next 4-5 years ".
With the detection of neutrinos, the investigations of the universe expand. "It allows you to see phenomena that come from very distant areas of the universe - Gammino tells us again - that have extremely high energies. Reconstructing what happens in the detector allows us to understand what happened in parts of the universe that are not accessible with other instruments. It completes a picture that conventional astronomy and astrophysics cannot obtain, but which can be completed with neutron and gravitational wave detectors. In both sectors the LNS have an important role ”.
Then there is the commission that deals with nuclear physics, the subject for which the laboratories were born, continues Gammino. Here, too, the information tells us how the cores are made inside and gives us information on how they can be used. To understand this, in the thirties, the professor Emilio Segrè, one of the boys of via Panisperna, won the chair of ordinary physics in Palermo, where he moved for a certain number of years. Then he had to run away from the racial laws and went to America, making the fortune of the Americans and even taking the Nobel Prize. When he was in Palermo, he had pieces of a machine sent disassembled by a cyclotron and, together with a chemist, he managed to isolate different components, one of which he called panormium, which is none other than technetium, what is used to do the scintigraphies ".
The application of nuclear physics in healthcare is increasingly widespread. And the National Laboratories of the South play an extremely important part in this path. “We have great expertise in the management of particle beams and their use - adds the director. More than twenty years ago, a line of research was launched by a professor from the University of Catania and a colleague from the Southern Laboratories to study the possibility of studying an optimal method to destroy tumors of the inside of the eye without damage. for the person who is hit by these particle beams. This work took a few years but, starting from 2002, we have had the authorization to treat patients. Over the span of twenty years, about 500 patients were treated with a tumor remission level that was over 95%, a much higher percentage than traditional methods ". A very important step: “it was the first use of particle beam in Italy for these purposes - he explains again. Starting from this, hadrontherapy developed in other Italian centers ".
The links with investigations on cultural heritage and the environment are also very important. In the first case there is Landis, "a laboratory that now has a place in the hearts of all museum directors and of all conservative and cognitive realities - says Gammino. The operations we do for cultural heritage are very important, as is the information we can give to researchers in the humanities. The presence of a certain mineral in the color, for example, can help periodization ”. A choral work, a painting where everyone puts a piece. “Ours is a great team effort, in which the collective, the comparison, the exchange are fundamental - he highlights. In the locker room there are roles, there are those who train and those who sit on the bench: but the team spirit unites researchers, technicians and administrators ".
In relation to the environment, the studies and researches are more than current. “We have an environmental radioactivity laboratory and with which we have done various initiatives in the past - continues the director. We have the equipment to assess the risks of environmental radioactivity and today we are studying the ashes of Etna, in collaboration with INGV, a French institution and the University of Catania. Personally, I gave a further push to support this activity to give answers, where possible, to the questions of the community, for example to get to know our volcano better ".
As for funding, the institution can count on various channels. “The bulk of the activities go under the ordinary fund for research institutions - explains Gammino. This assures us the salaries, the start-up of the plants and the funding for most of the research facilities. To this we add targeted projects that can be or on Pon and Por funds. We have an international evaluation committee that monitors the institute's expenses, and then there are the national scientific committees - in September, where it is scheduled and one in March and April, when it evaluates what has been done. To this must be added the European funds, which are very important for the international scope ". Finally, Gammino is keen to emphasize the stabilization of the staff. “Compared to eight years ago, we have solved most of the problems. When I started my mandate, there were 16 fixed-term counterattacks: we went to five ".
Source: Il Quotidiano di Sicilia
