Bibha Chowdhuri exposed Ilford half-tone photographic plates in the high altitude mountainous regions of Darjeeling, India and observed long curved ionizing tracks that appeared to be different from the tracks of alpha particles or protons. In a series of articles published in Nature, they identified a cosmic particle having an average mass close to 200 times the mass of electron, today known as pions. In 1947, the charged pions were again found independently by the collaboration led by Cecil Powell at the University of Bristol, in England. The discovery article had four authors: César Lattes, Giuseppe Occhialini, Hugh Muirhead and Powell. Since the advent of particle accelerators had not yet come, high-energy subatomic particles were only obtainable from atmospheric cosmic rays. Photographic emulsions based on the gelatin-silver process were placed for long periods of time in sites located at high-altitude mountains, first at Pic du Midi de Bigorre in the Pyrenees, and later at Chacaltaya in the Andes Mountains, where the plates were struck by cosmic rays. After development, the photographic plates were inspected under a microscope by a team of about a dozen women. Marietta Kurz was the first person to detect the unusual "double meson" tracks, characteristic for a pion decaying into a muon, but they were too close to the edge of the photographic emulsion and deemed incomplete. A few days later, Irene Roberts observed the tracks left by pion decay that appeared in the discovery paper. Both women are credited in the figure captions in the article. In 1948, Lattes, Eugene Gardner, and their team first artificially produced pions at the University of California's cyclotron in Berkeley, California, by bombarding carbon atoms with high-speed alpha particles. Further advanced theoretical work was carried out by Riazuddin, who in 1959 used the dispersion relation for Compton scattering of virtual photons on pions to analyze their charge radius. Since the neutral pion is not electrically charged, it is more difficult to detect and observe than the charged pions are. Neutral pions do not leave tracks in photographic emulsions or Wilson cloud chambers. The existence of the neutral pion was inferred from observing its decay products from cosmic rays, a so-called "soft component" of slow electrons with photons. The was identified definitively at the University of California's cyclotron in 1950 by observing its decay into two photons. Later in the same year, they were also observed in cosmic-ray balloon experiments