Overseas Student in Germany
In 1930 he went to study at the University of Berlin in Germany. As soon as he arrived in Berlin, hearing the Bothe report (博特报告) relating the emission of a new type of high-energy neutral radiation which was non-ionizing but even more penetrating than the hardest gamma rays derived from radium, induced by the bombardment of beryllium with α particles from a radioactive polonium source, therefore wrongly presumed to be gamma rays, Wang first suggested the use of a cloud chamber to study it. Lacking the support of his supervisor Lise Meitner, the experiment was nonetheless conducted one year later by the English physicist James Chadwick, thus discovering a new type of particle, the neutron, allowing him to win the 1935 Nobel Prize in Physics.
Four years later in 1934, Wang Ganchang received his Ph.D. with a thesis on β decay spectrum (German: Über die β-Spektren von ThB+C+C; Chinese:《ThB+C+C的β能谱》) under the supervision of Meitner before returning to China in April of that year.
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