Luis Walter Alvarez

Alvarez was awarded the 1968 Nobel Prize in Physics for his decisive work developing the hydrogen bubble chamber, which enabled the discovery of a large number of particle resonance states. His research group at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory used the bubble chamber to detect and characterize dozens of previously unknown subatomic particles.

Yes. In 1980, Luis Alvarez and his geologist son Walter Alvarez, along with nuclear chemists Frank Asaro and Helen Michel, proposed that a massive asteroid impact caused the Cretaceous–Paleogene mass extinction. Their evidence centered on a worldwide iridium anomaly found in the K–Pg boundary clay layer.

Alvarez worked on the Manhattan Project at the University of Chicago's Metallurgical Laboratory and later at Los Alamos. He is credited with developing the detonators used in the plutonium implosion-type Fat Man bomb and flew aboard the observation aircraft that accompanied the Hiroshima mission.

Alvarez spent the majority of his career at the University of California, Berkeley, and its Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory. He completed his PhD under Ernest Lawrence, the inventor of the cyclotron, and remained closely associated with the Berkeley radiation laboratory throughout his professional life.