The 2025 Giuseppe and Vanna Cocconi Prize for an outstanding contribution to Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology

More about the Prize and the Collaborations

The 2025 Giuseppe and Vanna Cocconi Prize is awarded to the Fermi-LAT and Fermi-GBM collaborations for their transformative contributions to gamma-ray astronomy and for laying the foundations of modern multi-messenger astronomy. Their pioneering work has not only revolutionised our understanding of the high-energy Universe but also enabled fundamental discoveries that will impact the field for decades to come.

The Fermi-LAT Collaboration

The Fermi-LAT collaboration is honored for its exceptional achievements in gamma-ray astronomy. Since its launch in 2008, the Large Area Telescope (LAT) has unveiled a remarkably rich gamma-ray sky, detecting over 5,000 gamma-ray sources, more than twenty times the number known prior to its operation. The collaboration has characterised these sources with unprecedented precision, providing the community with open data and advanced analysis tools that have become standard resources in astrophysics. Among its most significant achievements is the identification of over 200 gamma-ray-emitting pulsars, opening a new window into the study of neutron stars and pulsar magnetospheres. The Fermi-LAT collaboration played a leading role in the first-ever detection of an electromagnetic counterpart to a high-energy neutrino, emitted by the blazar TXS 0506+056, marking a cornerstone in the era of multi-messenger astronomy. The LAT has also enabled the discovery of gamma-ray emission from starburst galaxies, binaries, supernova remnants, and the enigmatic Fermi bubbles at the center of our Galaxy. These discoveries have profoundly deepened our understanding of cosmic particle acceleration and the extreme environments that produce high-energy radiation.

The Fermi-GBM Collaboration

The Fermi-GBM collaboration is recognised for its groundbreaking contributions to the study of transient gamma-ray phenomena and multimessenger astronomy. The Gamma-ray Burst Monitor (GBM) has detected more than 2,000 gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) and numerous other transient phenomena, systematically expanding our knowledge of short and long-duration bursts. A landmark achievement was the detection of the electromagnetic counterpart of the gravitational wave event GW170817, arising from the merger of two neutron stars. This discovery provided the first direct connection between gravitational waves and electromagnetic signals, confirming that neutron star mergers produce short GRBs and marking the birth of multimessenger astrophysics. The Fermi-GBM has also played a central role in cataloging and understanding GRBs, contributing essential data for unveiling the physics of these powerful cosmic explosions.

A Global Effort

The contributions of both collaborations have been made possible thanks to the commitment of scientists from Europe, the United States, and beyond, who have been instrumental in the design, construction, and operation of these instruments, and in leading the analyses that have changed our understanding of the high-energy Universe.

Cocconi and Fermi – a long story 

(by David A. Smith - Bordeaux, July 2025)

Vanna & Giuseppe Cocconi were brilliant physicists, pioneers of what we now call Astroparticle Physics. Giuseppe collaborated with Enrico Fermi from the start of his career until Fermi died 16 years later. Here’s the Cocconi story:

Giuseppe Cocconi (1914 – 2008)

Giuseppe Cocconi grew up in Como and was educated in Milan. When he finished his Laurea degree in 1938, at age 24, his professors sent him to Enrico Fermi at La Sapienza in Rome. They built Wilson cloud chambers together for six months, to study meson decay in cosmic rays (Fermi was 37.) Cocconi returned to Milan the same year and founded a cosmic-ray research group. His first student was Vanna Tongiorgi.

During the war, Giuseppe developed infrared detectors for the Italian Air Force. Vanna and Giuseppe wed when the war ended. Hans Bethe pushed for them to join the Cornell faculty, and they moved to Ithaca in 1947.

Giuseppe was widely appreciated for his skill as a physicist, but especially for his creativity and vision. As an example of the diversity of his interests, he and Philip Morrison published a Nature article in 1959 generally considered foundational for SETI (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence).

Also in 1959, CERN was building a proton synchroton (PS) that would deliver the highest energy beam ever achieved, 24 GeV. Giuseppe was a major driver in the push to design, build, and exploit instrumentation to reap the particle physics harvest the PS promised. He and Vanna took a sabbatical to CERN for 1959-1961 to that end.

Vanna Tongiorgi (1917 – 1997)

Born and raised in Milan, she started Physics at the University when she was 18 (in 1935) and began her doctoral work in 1938. In 1939 she and Giuseppe described the secondary radiation produced in atmospheric showers by primary cosmic rays. She was one of the first to understand nuclear spallation, where large nuclei get “splattered” into many fragments in collisions with high energy protons, and to measure the large number of neutrons that spallation causes in air showers (Figure 2).

The rest of her career focused on nuclear and particle physics measurements at accelerators. She worked at Brookhaven National Laboratory. In 1964 the Cocconis left Cornell and settled at CERN. For many years, Vanna was a mainstay of the Big European Bubble Chamber (BEBC) on the PS at CERN. Her colleagues valued her judgement and intuition, and her pertinent criticisms kindly expressed. From 1948 to 1982 she authored 104 articles.

Bruno Rossi (1905 – 1993) – a kindred spirit

For many, Bruno Rossi is the most famous Italian cosmic-ray scientist. The American Astronomical Society awards the annual Rossi prize for pathbreaking work in high energy astrophysics. Fermi LAT received the prize in 2011, Fermi GBM was so honored in 2018, and LAT team members Alice K. Harding and Roger W. Romani received the prize in 2013 for their work on the theoretical underpinning of Fermi LAT’s many pulsar results. To what extent did the work and lives of Rossi and the Cocconis overlap?

Rossi was 4 years younger than Fermi, and about 10 years older than the Cocconis. Fermi & Rossi fled from Italy to America in 1938. Rossi joined the Cornell University physics faculty in 1940, worked on the Manhattan Project with Fermi during the war, and joined the MIT faculty in 1946. It seems, then, that Cocconi filled the vacancy left by Rossi. The Cocconis presumably met Rossi during this period. A quick search for co-authored articles and of photographs of them together came up empty. I also found no articles written by the one and cited or referenced by the other. So indeed, Cocconi & Rossi were pioneers of astroparticle physics, but I have no information about whether they were rivals, friendly or not.

Conclusion – Cocconi & Fermi, a natural match

“Astroparticle physics” can be defined in two ways. Both definitions match perfectly what the Cocconis, Fermi, and Rossi were about. Both accurately describe the science that the LAT and the GBM enable. Both accurately describe the career paths of many of the LAT and GBM team members.

One is, “using particle physics methods to study astro things”, and the other is “using cosmic things to probe particle physics”.

The LAT & GBM teams are extremely grateful to the European Physical Society for recognizing that Fermi does a good job at Astroparticle physics. To us, a Cocconi prize for Fermi seems natural!

Author’s personal note

My father, Lloyd Smith, was a world’s leading accelerator physicist, specialized in designing beam optics. From the 1940s into the 1970s, he and/or we lived wherever the next biggest machine was emerging, with Berkeley as home base. When I was three months old, we moved to Geneva for the 1959-1960 year. Dad worked at CERN on the Proton Synchrotron.

My mother, Marianne Freundlich Smith, was a flamboyant mathematician and they had a lively social life. In Geneva, they were friends with the Fidecaros, physicists with strong personal and professional ties with the Cocconis.

Hence, I likely met the Cocconis while still a babe in arms, at a picnic or something.

Further reading, to go deeper

The author gleaned the above information from these articles:

Vanna Tongiorgi Cocconi

Giuseppe Cocconi

Giuseppe Cocconi and his love of the cosmos

Giuseppe Cocconi on Wikipedia (Wikipedia is the most complete in Italian, but the English and French versions are good too.)