Owen Chamberlain

Owen Chamberlain (1920-2006), American physicist and Nobel laureate. For their collaborative discovery of the antiproton (see Proton), Chamberlain and Italian-born American nuclear physicist Emilio Gino Segrè shared the 1959 Nobel Prize for Physics.

Chamberlain was born on July 10, 1920, in San Francisco, California, and completed his undergraduate studies at Dartmouth College, New Hampshire, graduating in physics in 1941. From 1942 to 1946 he served as a researcher on the Manhattan Project, which developed the atomic bomb (see Nuclear Weapons). After World War II, he worked, from 1947 to 1949, at the Argonne National Laboratory, near Chicago, Illinois, and then studied at the University of Chicago, from where he gained a doctorate in physics in 1949. He then joined the University of California at Berkeley, becoming a professor of physics in 1958, a position he held until his retirement in 1989.

Chamberlain's work in nuclear physics began with close investigation of subatomic particles (see Elementary Particles). His part in the atomic bomb project led him to study alpha particle decay, neutron diffraction, and high-energy nuclear reactions. In 1955, Chamberlain, together with Emilio Segrè, discovered the antiproton, a form of antimatter. Later, Chamberlain also confirmed the existence of the antineutron. He died on February 28, 2006, in Berkeley, California.