The highlights of the conference: The Legacy of Bruno Pontecorvo: the Scientist and the Man, held in Roma, Universit`a La Sapienza, 11-12 September, 2013, are summarised and illustrated.
Starting from the original Majoranas article of 1937, the see-saw mechanism is illustrated, first for one and later for three neutrino generations, and neutrinoless double beta decay is considered. Neutrino mixing and oscillations in three flavors ar
e described. The Yukawa couplings to the Higgs field of quarks and leptons are considered, their transformation properties under the corresponding flavor groups are spelled out and the principle of Minimal Flavor Violation is illustrated, in connection with possible new physics beyond the Standard Theory. The idea that the Yukawa couplings may be the vacuum expectation value of some new fields is introduced and natural extrema of potentials which are invariant under quark and lepton flavor groups are characterized. A recent result indicating large mixing of almost degenerate neutrinos is derived from the heavy lepton invariance under flavor ${cal O}(3)$.
Exotic charmonium and bottonomium resonances recently discovered are discussed and interpreted as diquark-antidiquark states containing a pair of charm quarks and a pair of light, up and down, quarks. Successes, shortcomings and predictions of the model are illustrated.
The GIM Mechanism was introduced by Sheldon L. Glashow, John Iliopoulos and Luciano Maiani in 1970, to explain the suppression of Delta S=1, 2 neutral current processes and is an important element of the unified theories of the weak and electromagnet
ic interactions. Origin, predictions and uses of the GIM Mechanism are illustrated. Flavor changing neutral current processes (FCNC) represent today an important benchmark for the Standard Theory and give strong limitations to theories that go beyond ST in the few TeV region. Ideas on the ways constraints on FCNC may be imposed are briefly described.
Universality of the weak interactions is reviewed, with special emphasis on the origin of the Cabibbo theory of strange particles beta-decays and its role in the discovery of the unified Electroweak Theory. Achievements and present challenges of the
Standard Theory of particles interactions are briefly illustrated. As an homage to Nicola Cabibbo, his leading role in the Roma school of theoretical physics and in the italian science in general is reviewed.
