The SIF-SFP 2024 Friedel-Volterra Prize awarded to Silvia Leoni

The Prize

To honor the memory of Vito Volterra and Jacques Friedel, the Italian Physical Society (SIF) together with the Société Française de Physique (SFP), awards a prize for a physicist involved in some Italian-French collaboration, in recognition of distinguished work in Physics research carried out within the past 10 years.

The prize is jointly established in 2016 by the two Societies with the aim to commemorate the two eminent scientists as well as to strengthen the relationship between the two Societies. The prize will be awarded on an annual basis and will be alternatively announced by the SIF and SFP, respectively.

The Friedel-Volterra 2024 Winner Silvia Leoni is Professor of Experimental Nuclear Physics at the University of Milan and INFN-Italy. She obtained the Ph.D. in 1992 from Milano University, with research at the Tandem Laboratory of the Niels Bohr Institute in Denmark. As a post-doc, she spent several years at the Niels Bohr Institute and at CSNSM Orsay. Her research interests have always been in the domain of nuclear physics, with particular focus on the investigation of the structure of stable and exotic nuclei. Central topics are collective modes of excitations (rotation and vibrations), coupling phenomena, order and chaos in the atomic nucleus, and coexistence of shapes. Her experimental activities have been carried out in the framework of international collaborations, with experiments at major laboratories in Europe (INFN-Legnaro, GANIL, IJCLAB-Orsay, ILL-Grenoble, ISOLDE-CERN) and North America (Argonne, TRIUMF). In these studies, she used gamma and particle spectroscopy techniques to explore the structure of nuclei produced with stable, radioactive ion beams and intense neutron beams. In particular, she has employed instrumentation consisting of multidetector germanium and scintillator arrays, charged particle detectors, and state-of-the-art gamma-ray spectrometers, such as the European germanium ball EUROBALL and the latest tracking AGATA array, for which she is currently spokesperson.

Of special mention are the results obtained on the damping of nuclear rotation in warm nuclei, a phenomenon precursor of the order-to-chaos-transition in the atomic nucleus. For this investigation, she developed novel methods to extract, for the first time, quantitative information from quasi-continuum gamma-ray spectra, also in connection with the decay-out of superdeformed, fast-rotating nuclei. In parallel to the study of the warm rotation, she investigated shape-coexistence phenomena in different regions of the nuclear chart, taking also advantage of neutron-capture reactions at the Institute Laue-Langevin in Grenoble, which provided evidence for shape-isomer-like states in nickel isotopes close to stability. Such systems turn out to be the lightest, ever, atomic nuclei exhibiting a photon decay hindered - solely - by a nuclear shape change. In the region of light, neutron-rich carbon and oxygen nuclei, the relevance of the three-body term in the nuclear force was also experimentally tested via pioneering lifetime measurements of excited states performed in GANIL with the AGATA array.

Silvia Leoni acts as co-spokesperson for several experiments in these areas of research and is a member of various international boards and committees for research laboratories in Europe, including the Program Advisory Committee at the laboratory LNL INFN, where she serves as president. She is currently Italian representative in the committee NuPECC (Nuclear Physics Expert Collaboration Committee), where she contributed to the preparation of the strategic planning in 2024. In addition, she acted as evaluator for several European funding Agencies and as a reviewer for international scientific journals. Since 2025 she is Editor in Chief for the European Physical Journal A, Experimental Nuclear Physics.

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