Richard Joseph "Dick" Davisson (December 29, 1922 – June 15, 2004) was an American
physicist.
Davisson was the son of
Clinton Davisson, a Nobel laureate, and his wife Charlotte. Davisson's maternal uncle, Sir
Owen Richardson, was also a Nobel laureate.
During World War II he worked on the
Manhattan Project as part of the
Special Engineer Detachment. At
Los Alamos, he met Professor
Robert Williams Robert, Rob, Robbie, Bob or Bobby Williams may refer to:
Entertainment Film
* Robert Williams (actor, born 1894) (1894–1931), American stage and film actor
* Robert B. Williams (actor) (1904–1978), American film actor
* R. J. Williams (born ...
, who later recruited him to teach at the
University of Washington.
As a graduate student at Cornell after World War II, Davisson built a cosmic ray machine that would do everything but write a grad student's thesis. He acquired a huge magnet from Navy surplus, built a cloud chamber and a set of Geiger counters and designed a universal-focus camera to record cosmic ray events. Then he designed and built an early electronic computer to record and sort the events according to energy, mass, charge, direction and frequency. Davisson went on to the University of Washington without a PhD.
Davisson was a member of the University of Washington's team which designed a system for detecting
subatomic particle
In physical sciences, a subatomic particle is a particle that composes an atom. According to the Standard Model of particle physics, a subatomic particle can be either a composite particle, which is composed of other particles (for example, a pr ...
s known as
muon
A muon ( ; from the Greek letter mu (μ) used to represent it) is an elementary particle similar to the electron, with an electric charge of −1 '' e'' and a spin of , but with a much greater mass. It is classified as a lepton. As wi ...
s. After the U.S. government pulled the funding on the
Superconducting Super Collider project, the team was recruited by
CERN
The European Organization for Nuclear Research, known as CERN (; ; ), is an intergovernmental organization that operates the largest particle physics laboratory in the world. Established in 1954, it is based in a northwestern suburb of Gene ...
to help build part of the muon
detector of the
ATLAS experiment in the
Large Hadron Collider
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the world's largest and highest-energy particle collider. It was built by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) between 1998 and 2008 in collaboration with over 10,000 scientists and hundred ...
particle accelerator, in which Davisson took part, e.g., creating tools to test the detector tubes and as a liaison between the University of Washington's team and the rest of the collaborating group.
Davisson retired in 2000, at the age of 77. He was married for forty years to Elizabeth "Betty" Davisson, a retired psychiatric social worker from whom he separated after fourteen years. They had one son.
References
External links
{{DEFAULTSORT:Davisson, Richard
1922 births
2004 deaths
20th-century American physicists
Manhattan Project people
People associated with CERN