Marietta Blau's Work After World War II Arnold Perlmutter Department Of
View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by CERN Document Server Marietta Blau's Work After World War II Arnold Perlmutter Department of Physics University of Miami Coral Gables, Florida 33124 completed, October 27, 2000 This paper has been translated into German and will be included, in a somewhat altered form, in a book Sterne der Zertrummerung, Marietta Blau, Wegbereiterin der Moderne Teilchenphysik, Brigitte Strohmaier and Robert Rosner, eds., Boehlau Verlag, Wien. 1 A. Introduction While it is clear that the seminal work of Dr. Marietta Blau was done in the 1920’s and especially in the 1930’s, it is also evident that her separation from the great research centers from 1938 to 1944 had a devastating effect on her productivity. It was during this period that Cecil F. Powell, at Bristol University, made use of Blau’s earlier tutelage on the preparation and analysis of photographic emulsions. According to Blau’s conversations with me (much later), she consulted with Ilford in the 1930’s to improve emulsion sensitivity and uniformity, and presumably had also imparted crucial lore of the technique to Powell. C.F. Powell, who had been a student of C.T.R. Wilson, had employed cloud chambers in a wide variety of studies in vulcanology, mechanical engineering, and nuclear physics. In 1938 and 1939 Powell’s experimental efforts turned to the use of photographic emulsions to investigate neutron interactions, and then to nuclear reactions1. With the coming of the war and then the British nuclear atomic bomb project, Powell established a formidable laboratory and collaboration for the analysis of emulsions and for their improvement by Ilford and Kodak.
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