Written under the supervision of Marcello Conversi, his thesis was on the measurement of longitudinal polarization of neutrons emitted from muon capture in nuclei (in Italian, unpublished).

[2] The definitive experimental proof of this hypothesis was achieved in 1962 in the first high-energy neutrino experiment at the Brookhaven 30 GeV Alternating Gradient Synchrotron (AGS), by showing that neutrinos from π+→μ+ + ν only produced muons, and not electrons, when interacting in the detector, a result for which Leon Lederman, Mel Schwartz and Jack Steinberger shared the 1988 Nobel Prize in Physics.

During this time he took part in experiments at the Proton Synchrotron (PS), on high-energy elastic scattering of hadrons from polarized targets, discovering unexpected spin effects in the diffractive region, with opposite sign for π+ and π−.

[6] It soon found an unexpected high rate of high-energy photons from the decay of neutral mesons (π0) emitted at large angles to the beams.

To keep the event rate below this limit, the electron detection threshold used in the event trigger was raised above 1,5 GeV, thus excluding from detection the yet undiscovered J/Ψ-particle with 3.1 GeV mass[7] (this particle, a bound state of a charmed quark-antiquark pair, was discovered in 1974 at the Brookhaven AGS and at the electron-positron collider SPEAR at Stanford, and for this discovery the 1976 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to B. Richter and S.C.C.

[8][9][10] The production of high-energy π0 mesons at large angles was soon understood as due to the strong interaction of point-like constituents of the proton (quarks, antiquarks and gluons).

[12] The purpose of the experiment was to detect the production and decay of the W and Z bosons at the Proton-Antiproton Collider (SppS) — a modification of the Super Proton Synchrotron (SPS).

UA2, together with the UA1 collaboration, succeeded in discovering these particles in 1983, leading to the 1984 Nobel Prize in Physics being awarded to Carlo Rubbia and Simon van der Meer.