Chung-Yao Chao

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Chung-Yao Chao (赵忠尧; 1902–1998), physical scientist. Chung-Yao Chao actually 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 Institute (now Nanjing University) in 1920 and earned Bachelor's degree in physics in 1925. Then he earned a PhD degree in physics from the California Institute of Technology in 1930.