George Rochester

George Dixon Rochester (born February 4, 1908 in Wallsend , North Tyneside , † December 26, 2001 ) was a British experimental physicist who dealt with nuclear and elementary particle physics . In 1947 he discovered Strange Particles with Clifford Charles Butler .

Rochester, the son of a blacksmith, studied physics at Newcastle University (then Armstrong College of Durham University) and was a post-doctoral student at Stockholm University (as an Earl Gray Fellow) and two years at the University of California , Berkeley (as a Commonwealth Fellow). After that he went as Assistant Lecturer at the University of Manchester , where he under Patrick Blackett led his own group in experimental particle physics and in 1953 Reader was. From 1955 he was a professor at Durham University, where he was one of the two pro-vice chancellors from 1967 to 1970 and retired in 1973.

Rochester and Butler discovered Strange Particles (that is, particles with Strange quarks ) as new heavy unstable particles in some of several thousand bubble chamber images of cosmic rays in 1946/1947. At that time they were called V-particles, a designation that is no longer in use today and originated from the V-shape of the images in the bubble chamber. Rochester and Butler also discovered that there were mesons ( K meson or kaon) and baryons ( hyperons ) of them. First they discovered the neutral kaon as a neutral particle with about a thousand times the mass of the electron (1946). To investigate more closely, they moved their bubble chamber to the Pic du Midi de Bigorre in the French Pyrenees, where the flow of cosmic rays was higher. The discovery was confirmed by a group at Caltech under Carl D. Anderson . Their discovery showed that the “zoo of elementary particles” and especially the hadrons was much more complex than previously assumed. The observation was first explained by Abraham Pais as a pair creation of new particles, and their relative longevity through the separation of the partners, each carrying a new quantum number (Strangeness, introduced by Murray Gell-Mann and Kazuhiko Nishijima ).

From 1958 Rochester was a Fellow of the Royal Society . The physics building he planned and inaugurated in 1997 at the University of Newcastle (Durham) and the annual Rochester Lecture on new developments in physics are named after him.

He had been married to Idaline Bayliffe since 1938, who died a few days after him. The couple had a son and a daughter.

literature

• Arnold Wolfendale , Obituary in Physics Today, Volume 55, 2002, Issue 8, pp. 63/64
• Rochester, Butler Evidence for the existence of new stable elementary particles , Nature, Volume 160, 1947, p. 855

Web links

• Obituary in the Daily Telegraph, Jan. 10, 2002