Portal:San Francisco Bay Area/Selected biography/5

Luis W. Alvarez (June 13, 1911 – September 1, 1988) was an American experimental physicist and inventor, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1968. The American Journal of Physics commented, "Luis Alvarez (1911–1988) 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 observed. He produced 3Hydrogen using the cyclotron and measured its lifetime. In collaboration with Felix Bloch, he measured the magnetic moment of the neutron. (more...)