Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi (center) tours the Remote Operations Center West at Fermilab and learns about neutrinos. (Photo courtesy of Fermilab)

Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi celebrated four decades of collaboration between Fermilab and Italy during a visit last week to Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia.

Renzi met with Fermilab Director Nigel Lockyer and Italian researchers to discuss the contributions Italy — and Italian scientists, engineers and students — have made and continue to make to Fermilab and to particle physics research.

While at Fermilab, Renzi toured an operations center that serves as a hub for Fermilab’s neutrino experiments and a technical area where high-tech, Italian-made particle accelerator components are assembled.

“The world of research is now global and interconnected,” Renzi said, addressing a group of about 50 Italian scientists, engineers and students gathered to welcome him to the lab.

As a significant contingent on Fermilab’s CDF experiment, Italian scientists were among those who discovered the top quark in 1995. It was a major success of the relationship with the Italian National Institute of Nuclear Physics, or INFN, that started in the early 1980s.

“Our involvement is not only at the level of the physics, but also at technology, and also our industry,” said INFN Vice President for Research Antonio Masiero. “We think that, working together, we can have a mutual benefit from both institutions.”

Fermilab scientist Luciano Ristori noted that one of Italy’s – and the world’s – great physicists made an important contribution to the laboratory in nothing less than its very name.

“We are all extremely proud of the fact that this important American research laboratory is named after the great Italian Enrico Fermi,” Ristori said, addressing Prime Minister Renzi.

Prime Minister Renzi was accompanied by Italian officials, including Ambassador Armando Varricchio, Deputy Minister of Economic Development Ivan Scalfarotto, and Consul General of Italy in Chicago Adriano Monti. Prominent scientists from Italy also traveled to Fermilab to celebrate the occasion.

Italian institutions have strong, ongoing partnerships with DUNE, its supporting Long-Baseline Neutrino Facility and Fermilab’s Short-Baseline Neutrino Program. Fermilab will reuse the detector for Rubbia’s ICARUS neutrino experiment, being upgraded at European laboratory CERN, which ran at the Italian Gran Sasso Laboratory from 2010-14.

“Italy is the beginning of a story, which is becoming a major American story, with neutrinos,” Rubbia said. “So I’m very happy to see how things are developing.”

Italy also plays a major role in Fermilab’s accelerator R&D. The Italian company Ettore Zanon is one of the few in the world capable of manufacturing the superconducting cavities — structures that impart energy to particle beams – designed at Fermilab for next-generation accelerators.

“You find at Fermilab that of 2,000 people, 130 are Italians,” Renzi said. “Research teams here are headed by Italians, and they are doing a great job. The important thing for us is to give Italians the opportunity not only to show the value of ‘made in Italy’ technology, but also to show the skills Italians learn in Italy. Most of these people graduated from Italian universities.”

— Italian prime minister celebrates country’s ties with Fermilab —