becquerel

unit of core activity

After the French physicist Henri Becquerel (Paris 1852 Pornichet 1908).

Becquerel's name remains particularly associated with the discovery of the radioactivity of uranium (1896), from which the research of radioactivity grew.

He determined that uranium grains affected a photographically sensitive layer, and attributed that property to certain rays named after him. For this discovery he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1903, together with the Curie couple.

> (see also curia)

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