Glaser, Donald Arthur


Glaser, Donald Arthur (1926- ), American physicist and winner of the 1960 Nobel Prize in physics for his invention of the bubble chamber, a device for detecting high-energy particles (see Particle Detector; Elementary Particle). With this device, Glaser contributed greatly to the understanding of atomic function and provided the technology for the discovery of new atomic particles.

Glaser was born in Cleveland, Ohio, the son of Russian immigrants. An accomplished violinist, Glaser became a member of a symphony orchestra at age sixteen and studied composition at the Cleveland Institute of Music. He received his B.S. degree in mathematics and physics from Cleveland's Case Institute of Technology (now Case Western Reserve University) in 1946, and his Ph.D. degree from the California Institute of Technology in 1950. In 1949 Glaser accepted a position as instructor at the University of Michigan, where he began his bubble chamber experiments. In 1959 Glaser became a professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley.

In creating the bubble chamber, Glaser built on the work of Nobel Prize winners C. T. R. Wilson, the inventor of the cloud chamber (a device that exposes charged particles by producing a trail of water droplets from air saturated with water), and C. F. Powell, who developed photographic techniques to capture images of charged nuclear particles on film. Both the cloud chamber and the emulsion technique were limited to the detection of low-energy nuclear particles. Glaser wanted to build a device that could reveal high-energy particles. He experimented with soda, seltzer, and beer without success. But he found that nuclear particles left a trail of bubbles as they moved through superheated ether (a colorless, flammable liquid). Using the bubble chamber, scientists have discovered new high-energy atomic particles. They have also used it to track neutral atomic particles advancing their understanding of the mass, lifetime, and decay of these particles.

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