Cosmic rays, radiocarbon and the beginning of high-energy particle physics: Marietta Blau and the "disintegration stars"

Autor(en)

Brigitte Strohmaier, Walter Kutschera

Abstrakt

This brief review describes the discovery of cosmic rays by Victor Hess from the Vienna Radium Institute and the later contribution of Marietta Blau through her observation of "disintegration stars"in photographic emulsion plates exposed to cosmic-ray bombardment. Marietta Blau, a nearly forgotten cosmic-ray pioneer from the Vienna Radium Institute, developed the nuclear emulsion technique for studying nuclear reactions, eventually discovering the disintegration of nuclei through high-energy cosmic rays. Blau survived the Holocaust by escaping to Mexico City from 1939 to 1944. Starting in 1948 at Columbia University, later as a staff member of Brookhaven National Laboratory and then University of Miami, she performed fundamental and original research with nuclear emulsions exposed to 3-GeV protons at the Brookhaven Cosmotron and to 6-GeV protons at the Berkeley Bevatron. Blau returned to Vienna in 1960, where at the Radium Institute a classical β-decay counting facility for radiocarbon dating had been installed, which was finally superseded by the Vienna Environmental Research Accelerator (VERA), a modern versatile accelerator mass spectrometry facility.

Organisation(en)

Isotopenphysik

Journal

Radiocarbon

Anzahl der Seiten

8

ISSN

0033-8222

DOI

https://doi.org/10.1017/RDC.2024.63

Publikationsdatum

09-2024

Peer-reviewed

Ja

ÖFOS 2012

103014 Kernphysik

Schlagwörter

ASJC Scopus Sachgebiete

Archaeology, Allgemeine Erdkunde und Planetologie

Link zum Portal

https://ucrisportal.univie.ac.at/de/publications/35e843ad-3823-4b92-adb3-f71943180e7e