Donald Arthur Glaser
1926–2013, Cleveland, Ohio, United States, Berkeley, California, United States
American physicist who invented the bubble chamber, an important device for detecting subatomic particles; he received the 1960 Nobel Prize in Physics.
Glaser was born in Cleveland, Ohio, studied at Case Western Reserve University, and earned a physics PhD from Caltech in 1950. In 1952 he developed the bubble chamber: a liquid held near its boiling point in which charged particles leave photographable trails of bubbles. The instrument made it possible to record and analyze high-energy particle interactions more effectively than cloud chambers.
The 1960 Nobel Prize in Physics recognized his invention of the bubble chamber. He later moved into molecular biology, investigating how bacterial cells synthesize proteins and how gene expression is regulated.
Nobel-winning work
Glaser received the 1960 Nobel Prize in Physics 'for the invention of the bubble chamber'. Developed from 1952, the chamber detects particles by the trails of bubbles they nucleate in a superheated liquid (propane, later liquid hydrogen). It superseded the cloud chamber for studying high-energy particles and underpinned the discovery of numerous resonances in the 1950s–60s.
Workplaces: University of California, Berkeley, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
United States