Arieh Shapira was born in 1928 in Warsaw, Poland. He arrived to Israel in 1934 and was a member of Kibbutz Sa'ad until 1948. He studied Physics, Mathematics and Chemistry at the Hebrew University.
In 1956 Arieh joined the Cosmic-Ray group of Prof. Sitte at the Technion, Haifa. He worked on the construction of muon telescopes and studied penetrating and extensive air showers. He got his D.Sc. in 1960. His thesis was “The Electronic Accompaniment of Penetrating Showers”.
Arieh was a visiting scientist at CERN during 1960 and 1963. He worked with the Hydrogen Bubble Chamber Group of Professors Peyron and Armenteros on proton anti-proton experiments. In these experiments the annihilation mechanism, the spin-parity of the resonance K* (890) and enhancements in the kaon-pion and kaon-kaon-pion masses were studied.
Arieh joined the experimental particle physics group of the Weizmann Institute in 1963. He worked on the adaptation of a program system to local computers and participated in various bubble chamber experiments: proton-proton collisions, kaon-deuteron collisions, proton-deuteron collisions and photo-production experiments. Arieh was the main contributeor to the deuterium experiments. On a sabbatical leave at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center in 1969 – 1970 he worked also on photo-production experiments.
In the 1980s Arieh took an active part in the TASSO e+e- experiment at DESY. After the group joined the LEP experiment in CERN he participated in the group analysis of various channels.
Arieh passed away in 2009 and was survived by his wife Hana and by his children.