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Name of creator

Georges Charpak (8th March 1924 – 29th September 2010)

Biographical history

Georges Charpak was born in 1924 in Dąbrowica in Poland (now Dubrovytsia, Ukraine). His family moved to Paris when he was 7 years old. He began his studies in mathematics at the Lycée Saint Louis (Paris) in 1941. However, the outbreak of World War II forced him to flee Paris under a false identity. He joined the resistance and in 1944 he was deported to the Nazi concentration camp at Dachau. He was released in 1946 and obtained French nationality in the same year. In 1945 he entered the Ecole des Mines (Paris), where he studied engineering, specializing in the steel industry. He obtained his degree in 1948. In 1949, he became a pupil of Frédéric Joliot Curie at the Collège de France and obtained a research position at the National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS). He obtained his PhD in nuclear physics from the Collège de France (Paris) in 1954, with a thesis on the emission of very low energy radiation associated with the disintegration of nuclei.

Following his meeting with Leon Lederman, Georges Charpak joined CERN in 1959, where he worked first in the Synchro-cyclotron division (SC), then in the Nuclear Physics division (NP) (1961), and the Experimental Physics division (EP) (1976). After his retirement from CERN he continued to work in the Particle Physics Experiment Division (PPE), the Accelerator Technology division (AT), and the Large Hadron Collider division (LHC).

He was part of the group that in 1961 precisely measured the anomalous magnetic moment of the muon (g-2), predicted by QED. He worked mainly on the development of new techniques for particle detection. In 1968 he invented the multiwire proportional chamber (a gas-filled box with a large number of parallel detector wires, each connected to individual amplifiers), for which he received the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1992. This invention, and Charpak’s subsequent developments, launched the era of fully electronic particle detection. His detectors are also used for biological research and could eventually replace photographic recording in applied radiobiology. Georges Charpak was also involved in other research; for example, he worked on fossil sound and the use of neutrino beams to search for oil deposits. Georges Charpak retired from CERN in 1989, and with some other physicists founded, a firm called "Biospace" to provide researchers in biology with innovative imaging tools based on his discoveries in high-energy physics and particle detection.

Parallel to his core research, Georges Charpak was involved in many other activities. His main commitments were the reform of science education for children (in 1996 he developed the “La main à la pâte” (“hands-on”) project) and the popularisation of science in general, protests against colonial wars, defence of Soviet dissidents, and the fight against nuclear weapons. Georges Charpak was a member of the French Academy of Sciences from 1985 and a member of the scientific committee of the Institut d’oncologie cellulaire et moléculaire humaine (IOCMH) in the University of Paris XI.

Immediate source of acquisition or transfer

Received from Georges Charpak in January 2008