Bibha Chowdhuri

Bibha Chowdhuri (1913-1991) was an Indian physicist, among the first women to pursue research physics in India, who worked in the early 1940s with Debendra Mohan Bose at the University of Calcutta studying cosmic ray tracks recorded in photographic emulsions exposed at high altitude. Their analysis identified evidence for a subatomic particle with a mass intermediate between the electron and proton, work published shortly before Cecil Powell's team in Britain identified and named the pion using similar photographic emulsion methods and received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1950 for the discovery. Some historians of physics have argued that Chowdhuri and Bose's earlier findings deserved greater recognition in the particle's discovery history than they received at the time. She later worked at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research and the University of Michigan on cosmic ray and high energy physics research.