Abstract
The paper “Processes Involving Charged Mesons” [1, 2] signed by Cesare Mansueto Giulio Lattes, Hugh Muirhead, Giuseppe Paolo Stanislao Occhialini, and Cecil Frank Powell was published in the May 24th, 1947 issue of Nature. In the introduction to this paper we can read the following announcement: “we have found evidence of mesons which, at the end of their range, produce secondary mesons.” The primary mesons, whose discovery was announced with these very words, were at first thought to be the long searched for pions, the particles responsible for the strong interaction predicted by Hideki Yukawa in 1935, the secondary mesons being the muons discovered by Carl Anderson and Seth Henry Neddermeyer in 1937. and identified with a particle different from Yukawa’s meson by Marcello Conversi, Ettore Pancini and Oreste Piccioni in Rome [18,19,20,21,22,23,24,25,26].
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Notes
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It is an interesting fact that both Blackett and Powell had been Rutherford’s students at the Cavendish laboratory in Cambridge.
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“Without doubt Powell’s main contribution to cosmic ray studies was the development of the nuclear emulsion technique into a precise tool for identifying the characteristics of ionizing particles traversing them. Pre-eminent was his discovery, with colleagues, of the \(\pi \)-meson, or pion, a result of fundamental importance for the development of our ideas about nuclear forces [...]. The desire to observe the primary cosmic rays themselves led to the use of balloons to carry the nuclear emulsions to great heights; in turn this gave rise to big international collaborations, collaborations which played a big part in the eventual creation of CERN.” Quoted from [31], p. 32.
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On the discovery of the \(\pi \)-meson, see also [33].
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On cosmic-rays studies at Chacaltaya, see [34].
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“[...] visitors were more frequently shown a whole gamut of the events on a screen in the darkroom by a microprojection arrangement set up by Occhialini and christened by him “the Telepanto” from (he said) “Tele: I see, Panto: Everything!”. In it the stage of the microscope was given a slow transverse motion by clockwork, and at the same time focusing in depth was put into regular slow oscillation, in order that the viewer could follow tracks dipping into the emulsion or out towards its surface.” Quoted from [36].
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Powell was awarded the 1950 Nobel Prize in Physics “for his development of the photographic method of studying nuclear processes and his discoveries regarding mesons made with this method.”.
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Powell was awarded the 1949 Hughes Medal “for his distinguished work on the photography of particle tracks, and in connection with the discovery of mesons and their transformation.”.
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Blackett was awarded the 1948 Nobel Prize in Physics “for his development of the Wilson cloud chamber method, and his discoveries therewith in the fields of nuclear physics and cosmic radiation.”
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O. L. wishes to thank his wife for her help in typing and revising this document.
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Lock, W.O., Gariboldi, L. (2024). Occhialini’s Contribution to the Discovery of the Pion. An Interview by L. Gariboldi. In: Gariboldi, L., Gervasi, M., Sironi, G., Treves, A., Tucci, P. (eds) The Scientific Legacy of Beppo Occhialini. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-37034-2_10
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