The Institute of Physics in the Post-War Period. Part 1: The Reconstruction

After the end of the war, Giovanni Polvani was engaged in a double activity of reconstruction: of the Institute of Physics in Milan and of the physicists community in Italy. He was elected president of the SIF: he started to organize a national congress every year, started the International School of Physics in Varenna, and succeeded in making the society’s journal, Il Nuovo Cimento, a physics journal on an international level. The Institute of Physics saw the arrival of two professors, Piero Caldirola for Theoretical Physics, and Giuseppe Occhialini for Higher Physics, who decided to work with Polvani as one institution, which was renamed Institute of Physical Sciences. Three other professors joined them in the 1950s—Carlo Salvetti for Radioactivity (later Nuclear Physics), Ugo Facchini for Experimental Physics II, and Guido Tagliaferri for Radioactivity—not to mention a large number of assistants who, in many cases, pursued a brilliant academic career at Milan University or in other Italian or foreign universities. The Institute of Physics stimulated the industrial milieu in Northern Italy to support researches in nuclear physics and technology for the possible construction of a nuclear power plant. A research institution, the CISE, was established in 1946 and for a decade worked in a strict symbiosis with the Institute of Physics. In 1952 Polvani managed to host in Milan the fourth division of the newly established INFN which helped his researchers to work in national and international collaborations, in particular in cosmic rays physics with Occhialini and at the CERN. An important step in Polvani’s activity in finding financial supporters for the research activities of the Institute of Physics was the establishment of the GAIFUM.