Luis Walter Alvarez

Luis Walter Alvarez (1911-1988) was an American experimental physicist, inventor and professor. He won the 1968 Nobel Prize in Physics for his discovery of resonance states in particle physics using the hydrogen bubble chamber. After earning his doctorate at the University of Chicago, he worked at the University of California, Berkeley under Ernest Lawrence, and during the Second World War he contributed to radar development and later to the Manhattan Project. After the war he pioneered the liquid hydrogen bubble chamber that enabled the discovery of many new particles, and in his later career he worked with his son, the geologist Walter Alvarez, on the hypothesis that an asteroid impact caused the extinction of the dinosaurs.