Talk:Georges Charpak

This work is historically important and well written. It should be published with minor revisions.

Throughout the article, subject titles such as Nuclear Physics, High-Energy Particle Physics and Particle Physics should begin in capital letters. Ionisation should be ionization and popularise should be popularize

Line 4, During World War II, he took part in the French Resistance and was later imprisoned by the Nazis in the Dachau concentration camp in Germany should be During World War II, he took part in the French Resistance and was imprisoned in the Dachau concentration camp in Germany by the Nazis, since after World War II, he could not have been imprisoned by the Nazis.

L15, Fabio Sauli, who joined the group at CERN also played an important role in developing this detector (please specify which detector? Multiwire Proportional Chamber?)

L1 below Fig 1, Linked to a computer, it could achieve counting rate thousand times higher than previously existing position detectors. Scintillation counters certainly are faster.

L13 below Fig 1, I suggest to add something like "For example, the MWPC was an indispensable part of the MIT-BNL precision spectrometer for the discovery of the J-particle in 1974, resulting in the Nobel Prize of Physics in 1976."

L2 below Fig 2, Moreover determination of the charge centroid provides an even better accuracy along the wires which is better than 200 μm.

Drift chamber and TPC A drift chamber is an apparatus for measuring the spatial coordinates of the trajectory of a charged particle

L2 below Fig 3, The time difference from a delayed signal provided by a scintillator is recorded and used to improve spatial accuracy.

L8 below Cherenkov counters and new detector developments In 1991 they proposed the Hadron Blind Detector, which was then developed in collaboration with Min Chen’s MIT team not an international collaboration.

Last 3 paragraphs, Every two years since 2002, I and others have organized a conference in Paris ‘Large TPCs For Low Energy Detection’. The purpose of the meeting is an extensive discussion of present and future projects using a large TPC for low energy, low background detection of rare events (low-energy neutrinos, double beta decay, dark matter, solar axions). Georges actively participated in this Conference giving introductory talks pointing out links between sciences, education and technology.

Georges has been active until the very end of his life. Recently he published, together with Francois Vannucci, a new book to celebrate physics that he loved. I met him at his home a day before his death and I was impressed by the clarity of his mind. He was excited to hear the new progress on physics and detector developments conducted by my group: the Micromegas and a novel spherical detector. Georges liked music and especially classic songs. He often invited musicians at his home in Paris and enjoyed the company of artists of the opera and friends at a typical ‘parisian bistrot’ where they sang around a piano player. For his last residence, as he wished, several musicians played classic music during the ceremony. I will keep him forever in my memory as a kind man, a humanist, enthusiastic, optimistic and always open to new ideas. I have the very strong feeling, as many others of his former junior collaborators do, that our second ‘father’ has passed away.

Referee C

The article is interesting and is a good tribute to a great physicist who did so much for science. I am definitely in favor of publishing it. It is well written, by a person who knew Charpak particularly well. I just found a few typos, which I directly corrected in the article. I also have two suggestions to the author:

1) Why not mention that Georges Charpak is the last physicist to receive the Nobel Prize alone,

2) Mention his support to his daughter Nathalie, a pediatrician in Colombia, and the fact that a honorary Ph.D title from the University of the Andes, Bogotá, was awarded to him? A sentence in the last section may be appropriate