Oreste Piccioni, a leader in the field of elementary particle physics and professor emeritus at the University of California-San Diego, has died. He was 86.
Mr. Piccioni died April 13 in his Rancho Santa Fe home.
Mr. Piccioni came to the U.S. from his native Italy in 1946 and did research work at MIT, Brookhaven National Laboratory and the European Organization for Nuclear Research.
While at Brookhaven, Mr. Piccioni visited the Lawrence Livermore Lab run by the University of California-Berkeley, and conferred with Owen Chamberlin and Emilio Segre, offering suggestions on their work that led to the discovery of antiprotons in 1955.
Four years later, Chamberlin and Segre were awarded the Nobel Prize in physics for their antiproton discovery.
Mr. Piccioni maintained that he had made important contributions to their work and, in 1972, filed a civil lawsuit against the two scientists, seeking $125,000 in damages and a public acknowledgment of the importance of his contributions.
A court dismissed the lawsuit, ruling that it had been filed too late.
In 1999, he was awarded the Matteucci Medal from the Accademia Nazionale Delle Scienze of Italy for his seminal contributions to particle physics.
