Lattes, Césare Mansueto Giulio

Césare Mansueto Giulio Lattes, (born July 11, 1924, Curitiba, Brazil—died March 8, 2005, Campinas), Brazilian physicist who, with American physicist Eugene Gardner at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1948 confirmed the existence of heavy and light mesons formed during the bombardment of carbon nuclei with alpha particles.

Lattes studied at the University of São Paulo with Giuseppe Occhialini in the 1940s and accompanied him in 1946 to the University of Bristol, where with Cecil Frank Powell they demonstrated that the two types of mesons could be identified by tracks left on photographic plates exposed to cosmic rays atop a mountain in the Bolivian Andes. Lattes became a full professor at the University of São Paulo in 1948, and the following year he cofounded the Brazilian Center for Research in Physics, serving as its scientific director until 1955. In 1967 he began teaching at the State University of Campinas; he retired as professor emeritus in 1986.