Luis Walter Alvarez

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Luis Walter Alvarez (June 13, 1911-88), an American experimental physicist, physicist, and professor who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1968 for the establishment of the hydrogen bubble chamber, which enabled the discovery of resonance states in particle physics.

"Luis Alvarez was one of the twentieth century's most innovative and productive experimental physicists," the American Journal of Physics wrote. "Alvarez earned his PhD from the University of Chicago in 1936 and went to work with Ernest Lawrence at the University of California, Berkeley.

Alvarez developed a series of experiments to see K-electron capture in radioactive nuclei, which was predicted by the beta decay hypothesis but not yet realized.

Using the cyclotron, he made tritium and measured the lifetime of the tritium.

He measured the magnetic moment of the neutron in collaboration with Felix Bloch. Alvarez joined the MIT Radiation Laboratory in 1940, where he was involved in a number of World War II radar projects, from early developments to identification friend or foe (IFF) radar beacons, now called transponders, to a system called VIXEN for preventing enemy submarines from knowing that they had been detected by the latest airborne microwave radars from knowing that they had been discovered by the new airborne microwave radars.

Enemy submarines would wait until the radar signal was strong enough and then reseprate, not escaping fire.

Early life

Luis Walter Alvarez was born in San Francisco on June 13, 1911, the second son and grandson of Walter C. Alvarez, a Spanish physician who lived in Asturias, Spain, and finally settled in the United States, who found a more effective way to diagnose macular leprosy. Gladys, Bob, his younger brother, Bob, and Bernice, his younger sister. Mabel Alvarez, his aunt, was a California artist who specialized in oil painting.

He attended Madison School in San Francisco from 1918 to 1924, then San Francisco Polytechnic High School. In 1926, his father became a researcher at the Mayo Clinic, and the family moved to Rochester, Minnesota, where Alvarez attended Rochester High School. He had always intended to attend Berkeley but instead went to the University of Chicago, where he gained his bachelor's degree in 1934, his master's degree in 1934, and his PhD in 1936. He belonged to the Phi Gamma Delta fraternity as an undergraduate. He migrated to Gamma Alpha as a postgraduate.

He found physics at Chicago in 1932 and had the opportunity to use the equipment of legendary physicist Albert A. Michelson. Alvarez also manufactured an apparatus of Geiger counter tubes arranged as a cosmic ray telescope, and under the direction of his faculty advisor Arthur Compton, an experiment was carried out in Mexico City to determine the so-called East-West effect of cosmic rays. Alvarez found that primary cosmic rays were positively charged despite more arriving radiation from the west. Compton submitted the completed paper to the Physical Review, with Alvarez's name at the top.

Even though his father had been a deacon in a Congregational church, Alvarez was an agnostic.

Early work

Gladys, Alvarez' sister, worked for Ernest Lawrence as a part-time secretary, and she referred to Lawrence as Alvarez. Alvarez was invited by Lawrence to visit the Century of Progress exhibition in Chicago with him. Alvarez, who is now engaged to Geraldine Smithwick, asked his sister if Lawrence had any open positions at the Radiation Laboratory after completing his oral exams in 1936. A telegram from Gladys arrived shortly after with a Lawrence job offer. This was the start of a long association with Berkeley's University of California. Alvarez and Smithwick were married in one of the University of Chicago's chapels and then migrated to California. Walter and Jean were their two children. They were divorced in 1957. He married Janet L. Landis on December 28, 1958, and had two more children, Donald and Helen.

He worked at Lawrence's experimental team, which was aided by a group of theoretical physicists led by Robert Oppenheimer. Alvarez performed a series of experiments to see K-electron capture in radioactive nuclei, which had been predicted by the beta decay theory but not observed. He created a special purpose Geiger counter to only detect the "soft" X-rays emerging from K capture, using magnets to filter out the positrons and electrons emanating from his radioactive sources. In 1937, he published his findings in the Physical Review.

If deuterium (hydrogen-2) is bombarded with deuterium, the fusion reaction yields either tritium (hydrogen-3) or a neutron (He + n). This is one of the most common fusion reactions, as well as the development of the thermonuclear gun and current research on controlled nuclear fusion. These two reaction products were not known at the time, but Hans Bethe predicted that tritium would be stable and helium-3 volatile, based on current theories. Alvarez did the reverse by revealing the particulars of the 60-inch cyclotron system. He tuned the machine to raise double-ionized helium-3 nuclei and then was able to produce a ray of accelerated ions, effectively using the cyclotron as a kind of super mass spectrometer. The helium-3 component had to be stable as it rose from deep gas wells, where it had been for millions of years. The radioactive tritium was created by Alvarez afterwards using the cyclotron and the 2H+2H reaction as a result, which was followed by a lifetime.

Alvarez created a mono-energetic beam of thermal neutrons in 1938, using his experience with the cyclotron and inventing what is now known as time-of-flight techniques. With this, he began a long line of experiments, often with Felix Bloch, to determine the neutron's magnetic moment. Their 0 = 1.93.02 n, which was published in 1940, was a major improvement over earlier work.

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Awards and honors

• Fellow of the American Physical Society (1939) and President (1969)
• Collier Trophy of the National Aeronautics Association (1946)
• Member of the National Academy of Sciences (1947)
• Medal for Merit (1947)
• Fellow of the American Philosophical Society (1953)
• Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1958)
• California Scientist of the Year (1960)
• Albert Einstein Award (1961)
• Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement (1961)
• National Medal of Science (1963)
• Michelson Award (1965)
• Nobel Prize in Physics (1968)
• Member of the National Academy of Engineering (1969)
• University of Chicago Alumni Medal (1978)
• National Inventors Hall of Fame (1978)
• Enrico Fermi award of the US Department of Energy (1987)
• IEEE Honorary Membership (1988)
• The Boy Scouts of America named their Cub Scout SUPERNOVA award for Alvarez (2012)
• Minor planet 3581 Alvarez is named after him and his son, Walter Alvarez.