CHAMBERLAIN, OWEN

born July 10, 1920, San Francisco, Calif., U.S. Owen Chamberlain American physicist who shared the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1959 with Emilio Segr for their discovery of the antiproton. This previously postulated subatomic particle was the second antiparticle to be discovered and led directly to the discovery of many additional antiparticles. Chamberlain worked on the U.S. atom bomb project from 1942 to 1946. Later, while completing his Ph.D. at the University of Chicago, he worked at Argonne National Laboratory, in Illinois. In 1948 he joined the faculty of the University of California at Berkeley, where he became a full professor in 1958. There he conducted research on alpha particle decay, neutron diffraction in liquids, and high-energy nuclear particle reactions. He and Segr used the bevatron (a powerful particle accelerator) to produce antiprotons in 1955, and the following year they confirmed the existence of the antineutron.