Chung-Yao Chao
Chinese physicist
Died when: 95 years 335 days (1151 months)Star Sign: Cancer
Chung-Yao Chao (Chinese: ???; pinyin: Zhào Zhongyáo; 27 June 1902 – 28 May 1998) was a Chinese theoretical physicist.He studied the scattering of gamma rays in lead by pair production in 1930, without knowing that positrons were involved in the anomalously high scattering cross-section.
When the positron was discovered by Carl David Anderson in 1932, confirming the existence of Paul Dirac's "antimatter", it became clear that positrons could explain Chung-Yao Chao's earlier experiments, with the gamma rays being emitted from electron-positron annihilation.
He entered Nanjing Higher Normal School (later renamed National Southeastern University, National Central University and Nanjing University), in 1920 and earned a BS in physics in 1925.
Then he earned a PhD degree in physics under supervision of Nobel Prize laureate Robert Andrews Millikan at California Institute of Technology in 1930.
Later he went back to China and joined the physics faculty of Tsinghua University in Beijing.