Owen Chamberlain
- Born:
- July 10, 1920, San Francisco, California, U.S.
- Died:
- February 28, 2006, Berkeley, California
- Awards And Honors:
- Nobel Prize (1959)
- Subjects Of Study:
- alpha decay
- antineutron
- antiproton
- neutron diffraction
- nuclear reaction
- Role In:
- Manhattan Project
Owen Chamberlain (born July 10, 1920, San Francisco, California, U.S.—died February 28, 2006, Berkeley, California) was an American physicist, who shared the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1959 with Emilio Segrè for their discovery of the antiproton. This previously postulated subatomic particle was the second antiparticle to be discovered and led directly to the discovery of many additional antiparticles.
Chamberlain attended Dartmouth College (B.A., 1941) and the University of California at Berkeley before working on the Manhattan Project, a U.S. research project that produced the first atom bombs. Later, while completing a Ph.D. (1948) at the University of Chicago, he worked at Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois. In 1948 he joined the faculty of the University of California at Berkeley, where he became a full professor in 1958 and professor emeritus in 1989. There he conducted research on alpha particle decay, neutron diffraction in liquids, and high-energy nuclear particle reactions. He and Segrè used the bevatron (a powerful particle accelerator) to produce antiprotons in 1955, and the following year they confirmed the existence of the antineutron.