Melvin Schwartz

Melvin Schwartz (born November 2, 1932 in New York City , † August 28, 2006 in Twin Falls , Idaho ) was an American physicist . In 1988 he received the Nobel Prize in Physics together with Leon Max Lederman and Jack Steinberger for their fundamental experiments with neutrinos .

Life

He grew up in New York during the Great Depression and attended the Bronx High School of Science .

He received his Bachelor of Arts (1953) and Ph. D. (1958) from Columbia University , where his later Nobel Prize laudator Isidor Isaac Rabi was the head of the physics faculty. At the same time he was at Brookhaven National Laboratory from 1956 to 1958 . Schwartz became an assistant professor at Columbia University in 1958. In 1959 he became a Sloan Research Fellow . He was promoted to associate professor in 1960 and professor in 1963. Tsung-Dao Lee , a colleague of Schwartz at Columbia University and also a Nobel Prize winner, inspired Schwartz to do the experiment for which he later received the Nobel Prize. Schwartz and his fellow award winners performed these experiments at the nearby Brookhaven National Laboratory in the early 1960s, when all three were at Columbia Faculty of Physics. The experiment was the first high-energy neutrino experiment and proved the existence of the muon neutrino (as the second type of neutrino after the electron neutrino, later another neutrino was found).

In 1966, after 17 years in Columbia, he went to Stanford University , where the new SLAC particle accelerator had just been completed. There he was involved in investigations into CP violation during the decay of long-lived, neutral kaons, as well as in another project in which hydrogen-like atoms were generated and detected from a pion and a muon .

In 1962 he became a Fellow of the American Physical Society . In the 1970s he founded Digital Pathways , of which he was president from 1970 to 1991. From 1991 to 1994 he was deputy director of high energy and nuclear physics at Brookhaven National Laboratory. At the same time he became a physics professor again in Columbia. He became II Rabi Professor of Physics in 1994 and retired in 2000. He spent his retirement in Ketchum, Idaho, where he died on August 28, 2006.

Since 1975 he was a member of the National Academy of Sciences .

Fonts

• The early history of high energy neutrino physics , in Hoddeson et al. a. (Ed.): The rise of the standard model , Cambridge University Press 1997

Web links

• Information from the Nobel Foundation on the 1988 award ceremony for Melvin Schwartz (English)
• Autobiography (Engl.)
• Biography at the APS