Ms. Wu Jianxiong was born in 1912 into an intellectual family in Liuhe, Jiangsu (China). From a young age, she showed an early talent for Mathematics and Natural Sciences. She studied at the Second Women's Normal School in Suzhou, National Central University of Nanjing (now Nanjing University).

In 1934, she graduated as valedictorian in Physics from the National Central University of Nanjing. In 1936, with financial support from her uncle, she went to the United States to study. There, she enrolled in the University of California, Berkeley (USA) to major in Nuclear Physics. In 1940, she successfully published a research paper on nuclear fission and radioactivity in the prestigious Physics journal in the US.

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Physicist who helped the US create atomic bombs during World War II - Wu Chien-Hung. Photo: Baidu

To continue her in-depth research in the field she was pursuing, in 1942, she applied to stay at the University of California as a teaching assistant. In 1944, she resigned to join Columbia University (1944-1980). At this time, the American physicists spread the word that if the experiment she performed would be absolutely accurate. Therefore, in 1944, she was invited to participate in the Manhattan Project. This was a top secret project to develop the American atomic bomb. Here, her task was to improve the Geiger counter to detect radiation and enrich uranium in large quantities. Through the process of gaseous diffusion, she developed a method to separate uranium atoms into charged uranium-235 and uranium-238 isotopes.

It was this research that contributed to the development of the American atomic bomb when World War II broke out. After World War II, she returned to Columbia University to teach. In 1958, she was officially appointed professor by the school at the age of 46. Another of her contributions was her research on radioactive decay.

To carry out this research, in 1950, she embarked on an experiment to test the law of conservation of parity. In addition to her, the research also had the participation of two colleagues, physicists Lee Tsung-dao (Columbia University) and Yang Zhen-ning (Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton).

After a long period of experimentation, in 1956, she came to the final conclusion that cobalt crystal nuclei emitted electrons on one side but not on the other. This meant that she had successfully proven that the law of conservation of parity was completely wrong.

This major breakthrough helped two physicists, Lee Tsung-dao and Yang Zhen-ning, win the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1957, for their work on the Theory of Parity Violation , based on the Wu Jian-hung Experiment. Because both of her colleagues received the Nobel Prize but she did not, this caused much controversy and discontent in the scientific community.

In parallel with her research on the law of parity, she conducted a series of important experiments in Nuclear and Quantum Physics. Specifically, in 1949, she was the first to confirm the theory of beta decay proposed by physicist Enrico Fermi in 1933 (finding how to make atoms more stable and less radioactive).

Although she did not receive the Nobel Prize, she is still recognized as one of the greatest scientists of the 20th century. With her revolutionary research for world science, she is also known as the "nuclear queen".

During her research, she received several prestigious awards: the Comstock Physics Prize (1964), the Tom W. Bonner Prize in Nuclear Physics (1975), the US National Medal of Science (1975), and the Wolf Prize in Physics (1978).

In 1997, she passed away in the United States due to a serious illness. In her final years, her only wish was to return to her homeland, but she was unable to do so. Therefore, after she left this world, her husband brought her ashes back to her homeland and buried them under a myrtle tree in the yard of Mingde School - the first school for girls in China founded by her father - where she also studied as a young girl.

Fulfilling her last wish, the tombstone was engraved with the words: "Wu Chien-Hung was an outstanding citizen of the world and forever Chinese."

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Source: https://vietnamnet.vn/danh-tinh-nu-hoang-hat-nhan-tung-gop-phan-che-tao-bom-nguyen-tu-2384320.html