 Nuclear emulsion track experiment

In 1947, Cesare Lattes, Hugh Muirhead, Giuseppe Occhialini and Cecil Frank Powell reported charged particle tracks in which a stopping particle was followed by a secondary particle. Their paper treated the interpretation as provisional.^[ref] The eventual distinction between pions and muons made a striking use of photography: a tiny permanent record could distinguish particles by how they slowed and transformed.

The method already had a history. In their jointly authored 1937 report, Marietta Blau and Hertha Wambacher described photographic plates exposed for five months at Hafelekar, $2300\mathrm{m}$ above sea level.^[ref] Neither shared the 1950 Nobel Prize in Physics, awarded to Cecil Frank Powell.^[ref] This was a development of photographic particle detection, with earlier contributors, rather than its invention by one person.

In his own later account, Cesare Lattes recalls calibrating emulsion shrinkage and the particle range–energy relation with accelerator-produced particles. Giuseppe Occhialini took borax-treated and untreated plates to Pic du Midi for about a month. The untreated plates provided a control; the treated plates retained more events because latent image fading was reduced. Later, Cesare Lattes exposed plates at the higher Chacaltaya station in Bolivia and obtained more candidate events.^[ref] The Pic du Midi cosmic ray exposure was roughly $3\mathrm{km}$ above sea level.^[ref]