Bruno Pontecorvo (,
Bruno Maksimovich Pontekorvo; 22 August 1913 – 24 September 1993) was an
Italian nuclear physicist, an early assistant of
Enrico Fermi and then the author of numerous studies in
high energy physics, especially on
neutrinos. According to
Oleg Gordievsky (the highest-ranking
KGB officer ever to defect) and
Pavel Sudoplatov (former deputy director of Foreign Intelligence for the
Soviet Union), Pontecorvo was also a Soviet agent. A convinced
communist, he
defected to the Soviet Union in 1950, where he continued his research on the decay of the
muon and on neutrinos. The prestigious Pontecorvo Prize was instituted in his memory in 1995.