Frederick Reines

Frederick Reines

Frederick Reines (born March 16, 1918 in Paterson , New Jersey , † August 26, 1998 in Orange , California ) was an American physicist . For the experimental proof of the neutrino he received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1995 (together with Martin L. Perl , the discoverer of the tauon ).

Live and act

Reines grew up as the son of Jewish immigrants from Russia; his father had a small shop in the countryside in New York State . He attended high school in Union City, New Jersey , until 1935 . He studied engineering ( bachelor's degree in 1939) and then physics at the Stevens Institute of Technology ( master's degree in 1941) and received his doctorate in 1944 from New York University under RD Present (The Liquid Drop Model for Nuclear Fission). During World War II he worked (before he completed his doctorate) in the Manhattan Project under Richard Feynman in Los Alamos . Even after the war he worked in nuclear weapons research, among other things, he studied the effects of the explosion shock wave with John von Neumann .

In the early 1950s, he and Clyde Cowan developed various methods of experimentally detecting neutrinos. The first direct observation of neutrinos, the Cowan pure neutrino experiment , was achieved by her group in 1956 at the newly built Savannah River nuclear reactor.

In 1959 he became a professor at Case Western Reserve University and head of the physics faculty there. There he led a group that was the first to detect neutrinos generated by cosmic rays . In 1966 he moved to the newly founded University of California, Irvine (UCI) as Dean of the Natural Sciences Faculty . There he also dealt with radiation detectors for medicine. His neutrino working group in Irvine took part in the IMB ( Irvine-Michigan-Brookhaven ) proton decay experiment, first detected the double beta decay in the laboratory and also set up its neutrino detectors early on to search for neutrinos from supernova explosions ( also on the initiative of Reines). At Supernova 1987A , such neutrinos could indeed be detected with the IMB, with which he was co-speaker, and the Japanese Kamiokande detector. For this, Reines received the Bruno Rossi Prize in 1989 . In 1988 he became Professor Emeritus at the UCI.

In 1958/59 he was a Guggenheim Fellow and from 1959 to 1963 a Sloan Research Fellow . In 1966 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences . In 1981 he received the Oppenheimer Prize and in 1992 the Panofsky Prize . He also received the National Medal of Science (1985). He was a member of the National Academy of Sciences (1980) and foreign member of the Russian Academy of Sciences (1994). In 1990 he received the Michelson-Morley Award and in 1992 the Franklin Medal .

He was married to Sylvia Samuels since 1940. They had two children, a son and a daughter.

Web links

Commons : Frederick Reines  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

• Information from the Nobel Foundation on the 1995 award to Frederick Reines
• Biography at the APS