Luis Walter Alvarez

Luis Walter Alvarez

Luis Walter Alvarez (June 13, 1911 – September 1, 1988) was an American experimental physicist, inventor, and professor who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1968 for his discovery of resonance states in particle physics using the hydrogen bubble chamber. In 2007 the American Journal of Physics commented, "Luis Alvarez was one of the most brilliant and productive experimental physicists of the twentieth century." After receiving his PhD from the University of Chicago in 1936, Alvarez went to work for Ernest Lawrence at the Radiation Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley. Alvarez devised a set of experiments to observe K-electron capture in radioactive nuclei, predicted by the beta decay theory but never before observed. Read more on Wikipedia

Since 2007, the English Wikipedia page of Luis Walter Alvarez has received more than 1,211,403 page views. His biography is available in 67 different languages on Wikipedia (up from 66 in 2019). Luis Walter Alvarez is the 354th most popular physicist (down from 316th in 2019), the 2,339th most popular biography from United States (down from 1,865th in 2019) and the 71st most popular American Physicist.