Brazilian physicist who, with American physicist Eugene Gardner at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1948 confirmed the existence of heavy and light mesons (meson) formed during the bombardment of carbon nuclei with alpha particles.

Lattes studied at the University of São Paulo with Giuseppe Occhialini in the 1940s and accompanied him in 1946 to the University of Bristol, where with Cecil Frank Powell (Powell, Cecil Frank) they demonstrated that the two types of mesons could be identified by tracks left on photographic plates exposed to cosmic rays atop a mountain in the Bolivian Andes. Lattes became a full professor at the University of São Paulo in 1948 and also taught at the University of Brazil after 1948 and, in the 1950s, as a research associate in the United States.