| SAMADHA - CHACALTAYA LABORATORY |
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| The Chacaltaya Laboratory | History | Real time dosimetry data | Real time bonner spheres data | Real time weather data | Photo Gallery | Back to SAMADHA home |
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The Chacaltaya Laboratory has a long history.
Built in 1947, at first it was used as a meteorological station. Soon afterwards, a road was built to give access to a ski station opened in 1940 by the Club Andino Boliviano. Shortly after, thanks to the extreme altitude of the site and the high cosmic rays flux, experiments on elementary particle and cosmic ray physics were carried out in the laboratory, whose results gave important contributions to these fields of research. |
The Club Andino Boliviano The skier is the physicist F. Handel (around 1950) |
The construction of the laboratory |
The first building |
The laboratory around 1952 The glacier on the left is now disappeared |
Ismael Escobar, Andrea Wataghin and Cesare Lattes at Chacaltaya in the early '50s. |
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The name of Chacaltaya became famous mainly thanks to the discovery of the pion particle in 1947, made by the physicists Cesare Lattes, Giuseppe Occhialini and Cecil Powell using nuclear emulsions, a discovery that confirmed the predictions of Yukawa theory on strong interactions. For this discovery Cecil Powell and Hideki Yukawa won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1950. |
Pion-muon decay in nuclear emulsion Credit: Cassio Leite Vieira & Antonio Augusto Passos Videira, 2014 |
The physicists Cesare Lattes, Beppo Occhialini and Cecil Powell, who discovered the pion at Chacaltaya |
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Beside particle physics, the laboratory reached an international importance in
the field of cosmic rays, with many different projects carried out until the present days.
Here some descriptions of the experimental reaserches performed at Chacaltaya in the past (credit: FIUMSA). |