Clyde E. Wiegand

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Clyde E. Wiegand (born May 23, 1915 in Long Beach (Washington) , † July 5, 1996 in Oakland (California) ) was an American experimental particle physicist.

Wiegand attended school in Oakland and Salem (Oregon) and studied from 1933 at Willamette University . He did not get a bachelor's degree until 1940 because he was also working as a radio technician at a local station, and his training as a physicist did not begin until 1941 at the University of California, Berkeley , where he introduced himself directly to Ernest O. Lawrence at his cyclotron to work. Lawrence initially sent him back to university, but got him a job in his laboratory in December 1941. First he worked on the cyclotron used for isotope separation. From 1943 to 1946 he worked in the Manhattan Project in Los Alamos as a member of Emilio Segrès' group, where he built electronic amplifiers for alpha particle detectors, among other things. After the war he was back at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory , where he received his doctorate in 1950 under Segrè. He stayed at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, where he officially retired in 1980, but remained scientifically active there.

Wiegand was part of the team led by Owen Chamberlain , Emilio Segré and Thomas Ypsilantis , who discovered the antiproton on the Bevatron in 1955 . In particular, his expertise in the construction of the counter electronics was of decisive importance for the success of the experiment. Chamberlain and Segrè received the Nobel Prize for this in 1959. Wiegand also installed detector electronics at the CERN, which was under construction . In the 1970s he dealt with kaonic atoms (normal atomic nuclei with bound kaons instead of electrons).

He had been married since 1942 and had a son and two daughters.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Owen Chamberlain, Emilio Segré, Clyde E. Wiegand, Thomas Ypsilantis: Antiprotons . Nature, Vol. 177, 1956, pp. 11-12.
personal data
SURNAME Wiegand, Clyde
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American physicist
DATE OF BIRTH May 23, 1915
PLACE OF BIRTH Long Beach, Washington
DATE OF DEATH 5th July 1996
Place of death Oakland