Irène Joliot-Curie was born in Paris on 12 September 1897, as the daughter of Nobel Prize laureates Marie Skłodowska and Pierre Curie.
As a young woman during World War I Irène worked together with her mother to provide mobile X-ray units for wounded soldiers. She resumed her studies at the university in Paris after the war and later worked at the institute that her parents had founded. It was there that she conducted her Nobel Prize-awarded work together with Frédéric Joliot, whom she married in 1926. The couple was politically active and worked to combat fascism and Nazism. They had two children.
Irène Joliot-Curie and Frédéric Joliot shared the 1935 #NobelPrize in Chemistry "in recognition of their synthesis of new radioactive elements".
Radiation from radioactive substances also became an important tool in investigating atoms. When Irène Joliot-Curie and Frédéric Joliot bombarded a thin piece of aluminum with alpha particles (helium atom nuclei) in 1934, a new kind of radiation was discovered that left traces inside an apparatus known as a cloud chamber. The pair discovered that the radiation from the aluminum continued even after the source of radiation was removed. This was because aluminum atoms had been converted into a radioactive isotope of phosphorus. That meant that, for the first time in history, a radioactive element had been created artificially.
Photo: Irène Joliot-Curie in full academic regalia on May 23, 1921, when she accepted an honorary degree at the University of Pennsylvania on behalf of her mother Marie Curie (1867-1934).
Grateful thanks to
No comments:
Post a Comment