César Lattes
| Cesare Mansueto Giulio Lattes | |
|---|---|
| Born |
July 11, 1924 Curitiba, Paraná, Brazil |
| Died | March 8, 2005 (aged 80) Campinas, São Paulo, Brazil |
| Nationality | Brazilian |
| Fields | Physics |
| Known for | Discovery of the pion |
Cesare Mansueto Giulio Lattes (11 July 1924 – 8 March 2005), also known as Cesar (or César) Lattes, was a Brazilian experimental physicist, one of the discoverers of the pion, a composite subatomic particle made of a quark and an antiquark.
Lattes was born to a family of Italian-Jewish immigrants in Curitiba, Paraná Brazil. He did his first studies there and also in São Paulo. He then went to the University of São Paulo, graduating in 1943, in mathematics and physics. He was part of an initial group of young Brazilian physicists who worked under European teachers such as Gleb Wataghin and Giuseppe Occhialini. Lattes was considered the most brilliant of those and was noted at a very young age as a bold researcher. His colleagues, who also became important Brazilian scientists, were Oscar Sala, Mário Schenberg, Roberto Salmeron, Marcelo Damy de Souza Santos and Jayme Tiomno. At the age of 25, he was one of the founders of the Brazilian Center for Physical Research (Centro Brasileiro de Pesquisas Físicas) in Rio de Janeiro.
From 1947 to 1948, Lattes launched on his main research line by studying cosmic rays. He visited a weather station on top of the 5,200-meter high Chacaltaya mountain in Bolivia, using photographic plates to register the rays. Travelling to England with his teacher Occhialini, Lattes went to work at the H. H. Wills Laboratory of the University of Bristol, directed by Cecil Powell. There, he improved on the nuclear emulsion used by Powell by adding more boron to it. In 1947, he made his great experimental discovery with Powell: the pion (or pi meson). Lattes then proceeded to write a paper for Nature without bothering to ask for Powell's consent. In the same year, he was responsible for calculating the new particle's mass. A year later, working with Eugene H. Gardner (1913-1950) at UC Berkeley, Lattes was able to detect the artificial production of pions in the lab's cyclotron, by bombarding carbon atoms with alpha particles. He was just 24 years old.
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