Georges Charpak
1924–2010, Dąbrowica, Poland (now Dubrovytsia, Ukraine), Paris, France
Polish-born French physicist awarded the 1992 Nobel Prize in Physics for inventing the multiwire proportional chamber, the detector that revolutionized particle tracking.
Born in Dąbrowica, Poland (now Dubrovytsia, Ukraine), Charpak moved to France as a child, joined the Resistance during WWII and was deported to Dachau. After the war he studied engineering and earned his doctorate in nuclear physics under Frédéric Joliot-Curie (1954). At CERN from 1959, he invented the multiwire proportional chamber in 1968: a grid of closely spaced anode wires acting as independent detectors, capable of tracking millions of particle trajectories per second — essential to every modern collider experiment. He later developed radiography detectors and science-education programs ('La main à la pâte').
Nobel-winning work
In 1968 Charpak realized that each wire in a proportional counter operates as an independent detector, so a plane of closely spaced wires between two cathodes could localize particles with sub-millimeter precision at rates of ~10⁵–10⁶ particles per second per wire — orders of magnitude beyond the bubble chambers it replaced.
The multiwire proportional chamber, together with its successors (drift chambers, time projection chambers, and later GEM/micromegas devices he helped develop), became the standard tracking technology of particle physics; variants spread to medical imaging and nuclear medicine.
Workplaces: CERN, ESPCI Paris
France, Poland