Raymond Davis Jr. (October 14, 1914 – May 31, 2006) was an Americanchemist andphysicist. He is best known as the leader of theHomestake experiment in the 1960s-1980s, which was the first experiment to detectneutrinos emitted from the Sun; for this he shared the 2002Nobel Prize in Physics.[1]
Davis was born in Washington, D.C., where his father was a photographer for theNational Bureau of Standards. He spent several years as a choirboy to please his mother, although he could not carry a tune. He enjoyed attending the concerts at the Watergate before air traffic was loud enough to drown out the music. His brother Warren, 14 months younger than he, was his constant companion in boyhood. He received his B.S. from theUniversity of Maryland in 1938 in chemistry, which is part of theUniversity of Maryland College of Computer, Mathematical, and Natural Sciences. He also received a master's degree from that school and a Ph.D. fromYale University inphysical chemistry in 1942.[2]
Davis reports that he was asked "to find something interesting to work on," and dedicated his career to the study ofneutrinos, particles which had been predicted to explain the process ofbeta decay, but whose separate existence had not been confirmed. Davis investigated the detection of neutrinos by beta decay, the process by which a neutrino brings enough energy to a nucleus to make certain stable isotopes into radioactive ones. Since the rate for this process is very low, the number of radioactive atoms created in neutrino experiments is very small, and Davis began investigating the rates of processes other than beta decay that would mimic the signal of neutrinos.
Using barrels and tanks ofcarbon tetrachloride as detectors, Davis characterized the rate of the production ofargon-37 as a function of altitude and as a function of depth underground. He deployed a detector containing chlorine atoms at the Brookhaven Reactor in 1954 and later one of the reactors at Savannah River. These experiments failed to detect a surplus of radioactive argon when the reactors were operating over when the reactors were shut down, and this was taken as the first experimental evidence that neutrinos causing the chlorine reaction, and antineutrinos produced in reactors, were distinct. Detecting neutrinos proved considerably more difficult than not detecting antineutrinos. Davis was the lead scientist behind theHomestake Experiment, the large-scale radiochemical neutrino detector which first detected evidence of neutrinos from the sun.[3][2]
Davis met his wife Anna Torrey at Brookhaven and together they built a 21-foot wooden sailboat, theHalcyon. They had five children and lived in the same house in Blue Point, New York for over 50 years.[4] On May 31, 2006, he died inBlue Point, New York, from complications ofAlzheimer's disease.[6][7]
