May 31, 2006 - Death of Raymond Davis Jr., the first to detect neutrinos from the Sun

In 1938, he received a BA in Chemistry from the University of Maryland and a Ph.D. in Chemistry-Physics from Yale University.

In 1948, he joined the Brookhaven National Laboratory where he dedicated himself to finding peaceful uses for nuclear energy. It is at that moment that he decides to dedicate his professional career to neutrinos, investigating their detection by beta decay, a process by which a neutrino carries enough energy into a nucleus to convert certain stable isotopes into radioactive ones. Since the rate of this process is very low, the number of radioactive atoms created in neutrino experiments is very small, Davis began to investigate the rates of processes other than beta decay that would mimic the neutrino signal.

He is known for directing the experiment to detect neutrinos emitted by the Sun, called the Homestake project, between 1960 and 1980 and, for this, he shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2002 with the Japanese physicist Masatoshi Koshiba and with the Italian Riccardo Giacconi, for his pioneering contributions to astrophysics. He was 88 years old when he was awarded the prize.

With an impressive professional career in which he has written a multitude of publications and won prizes and medals for his research.

If you want to know more about this scientist, click on the following link: Raymond Davis Jr.