Raymond Davis Jr.

Raymond Davis Jr. was an American chemist and physicist whose pioneering solar-neutrino experiments helped establish neutrino astronomy. He shared the 2002 Nobel Prize in Physics.

Homestake Experiment: A deep-underground experiment that detected solar neutrinos using a large tank of chlorine-based cleaning fluid. Davis led this pioneering experiment, which ran for decades in South Dakota's Homestake gold mine.
Chlorine-37: A stable isotope of chlorine with 17 protons and 20 neutrons. Solar neutrinos converted chlorine-37 nuclei into radioactive argon-37 in Davis's detector.
Brookhaven National Laboratory: A United States research laboratory in New York that conducts work in physics, chemistry, and related sciences. Davis spent much of his research career there, developing techniques for detecting rare particles.
Masatoshi Koshiba: A Japanese physicist who led neutrino experiments at Kamiokande and shared the 2002 Nobel Prize in Physics. Koshiba shared the Nobel with Davis for pioneering contributions to astrophysics through neutrino detection.
Solar Neutrino Problem: The historical mismatch between measured solar-neutrino fluxes and predictions from models of the Sun. Davis's chlorine experiment detected far fewer solar neutrinos than solar models predicted.
Argon-37: A radioactive argon isotope produced when a neutrino converts a chlorine-37 nucleus. Davis's team periodically extracted and counted these rare atoms to estimate the neutrino flux.
Manhattan Project: The United States-led wartime program that developed the first nuclear weapons during World War II. Davis worked on the project early in his career, applying his training in chemistry.
John Bahcall: An American astrophysicist who calculated expected solar-neutrino fluxes using models of the Sun. His predictions made the shortfall in Davis's measurements a precise scientific puzzle.
Kamiokande: A Japanese underground water-Cherenkov detector that studied neutrinos and observed neutrinos from Supernova 1987A. Its independent observations helped confirm the solar-neutrino deficit found by Davis.
Neutrino: An electrically neutral elementary particle that interacts only through the weak force and gravity. The experiment's signal began with neutrinos interacting with chlorine nuclei.

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