Ten Nobels for the future

Georges Charpak was born in Dabrovica, Poland, in 1924 and became a French citizen in 1946. He studied at Montpellier and Paris, where he received his BSc in Engineering in 1946. He earned his PhD in Physics in 1954 with experimental research in nuclear physics conducted at the Collège de France.

He then worked at the CNRS from 1948 to 1959, before moving to CERN at Geneva. Since 1984 he has also been Joliot-Curie Professor at the Ecole Supérieure de Physique et de Chimie of Paris.

In 1992 Charpak was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for the development of particle detectors, and in particular the multiwire proportional chamber, an elegant and economical solution to a complex problem.

His pioneering work came in 1968, when he realized the importance of connecting the detector directly to a computer, enabling researchers to record the trajectories of particles with great accuracy and in much larger numbers compared with previous techniques. He has created many new types of detector that have played a fundamental role in the subnuclear physics of the past twenty years and in the development of new imaging techniques using ionizing and beta radiation recently adopted in medicine and biology. Charpak has received many international awards and honours, including the Paul Ricard Prize of the Societé Française de Physique in 1980, the Prize of the Commissariat à l'Energie Atomique de l'Académie des Sciences in 1984 and the High Energy and Particle Physics Prize of the European Physical Society in 1989.

He is a member of the Académie Française des Sciences and a foreign or honorary member of the National Academy of Sciences in the United States, the Russian Academy of Sciences and the Austrian Academy of Sciences.

1994
Physics without frontiers