Jack Steinberger

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Jack Steinberger
(on July 23, 2008 in Bad Kissingen)

Jack Steinberger (born May 25, 1921 as Hans Jakob Steinberger in Bad Kissingen , † December 12, 2020 in Geneva ) was an American physicist and a 1988 Nobel Prize laureate in physics .

family

Jack Steinberger (left) with Joske Ereli
(on July 23, 2008 in Bad Kissingen )

His father Ludwig Steinberger - one of the twelve children of a small cattle dealer from Schonungen - worked in the spa town of Bad Kissingen as a cantor and religious teacher for the Jewish community since 1896 . His mother Berta Steinberger, who had also studied, came from the Nuremberg hop-trading family May.

His son Ned (* 1948) is the founder of Steinberger , a US manufacturer of electric basses and guitars .

Life

In his youth, Jack Steinberger attended the Kissinger Realgymnasium from 1931 to 1934 (the Jack Steinberger Gymnasium, which has now been named after him ). Against the background of increasing Nazi terror, the Steinberger couple sent their two eldest sons Jakob and Herbert to the USA through a charitable Jewish organization before they graduated from school in 1934, where they were accepted by Barnett Faroll, a grain trader in Chicago . The parents and the youngest brother Rudolf only managed to escape to the USA in 1937 and 1938.

In Chicago , Jack Steinberger studied chemistry after graduating from New Trier High School in Winnetka (Illinois) , but discovered his great interest in physics , which he studied at the University of Chicago after the warstudied. In 1942 he made his bachelor's degree. During World War II, he was engaged in military research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Because he was active in left-wing political circles at the time (he was a union member at MIT and supported Franklin D. Roosevelt in his campaign), he was also targeted by the FBI, which continued when he refused to issue a statement in 1949 to swear to Berkeley University that he was not a communist. He refused to participate in the American atomic bomb project. In 1948 he wrote his doctoral thesis ( Ph.D. ) with Enrico Fermi, whom he admired, and in 1948/49 he was at the Institute for Advanced Study(and again in 1959/60). At first he wanted to work as a theoretical physicist, but turned to experimental particle physics for his dissertation. In 1949/50 he was research assistant at the University of California, Berkeley with Gian Carlo Wick , where he experimented on the electron synchrotron built by Edwin McMillan . In 1950 he was appointed professor at Columbia University in New York , here and at the Nevis Laboratory he was Higgins Professor of Physics until 1971. In 1958 he became a Sloan Research Fellow . 1962 finally took place at the " Brookhaven National Laboratory " in collaboration with Leon Max Lederman and Melvin Schwartz that famous experiment took place that was to bring these three scientists the Nobel Prize in Physics in recognition of their basic research on neutrinos in 1988 : This experiment provided direct evidence that at least two types of neutrinos exist, namely the electron neutrino and the Muon neutrino . He donated his award to his former high school "New Trier High School".

After the Second World War , he temporarily returned to Europe, where, among other things, from 1968 he conducted research at CERN and the European Laboratory for Elementary Particles in Geneva and conducted a number of important experiments in the field of particle physics . In 1986 he officially retired from CERN, but continued his research there. He also taught part-time at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa .

Steinberger died on December 12, 2020 at the age of 99 in Geneva.

plant

For his dissertation he treated an experimental problem at the suggestion of Fermi. Bruno Rossi and Matthew Sands had observed an inexplicable deficit of decay in muons from cosmic rays. Steinberger suggested that it was not a two-body decay (into electron and neutrino), but a three-body decay (e.g. with another neutrino), which he also showed experimentally. That was a contribution to the universality of the weak interaction (from a later point of view an early reference to a muon neutrino). At the Institute for Advanced Study he did a theoretical thesis on the decay of mesons into other particles via closed loops of virtual particles as intermediate stages.

In 1949/50 he was in Berkeley and he carried out the first experiments on the photo production of the pion (with AS Bishop), proved the existence of neutral pions (with Wolfgang Panofsky and J. Stellar) and measured the mean lifespan of the pion together with Owen Chamberlain , Robert F. Mozley and Clyde E. Wiegand .

From 1950 he did research at the Nevis Laboratory of Columbia University on their new 380 MeV cyclotron. Together with colleagues he determined the spin and parity of pions, the difference in mass between charged and neutral pions and the scattering of charged pions. In the beginning they still used scintillation counters as detectors, around 1954 they adapted Donald Glaser's bubble chamber technology and developed it further. In this way, discoveries of strange particles were made at the Cosmotron of the Brookhaven National Laboratory , including the discovery of the Σ 0and the determination of its mass. This was important as confirmation of the SU (3) -flavor symmetry (the later quark symmetry from the up, down, strange quark components). In the bubble chamber experiments he often worked with Italian physicists such as Marcello Conversi . The experiments confirmed the parity violation in hyperons .

In 1961 he was involved in the first high-energy neutrino experiment, which, together with Melvin Schwartz (who initiated the experiment) and Leon Max Lederman, brought him the Nobel Prize and demonstrated the muon neutrino. It took place at the AGS synchrotron of the Brookhaven Laboratory with large spark chambers as detectors. A pion beam was generated and the muons formed when the pions decay were detected in front of a steel wall. The spark chambers were used to detect the neutrinos, whereby the muon neutrinos could be detected by the fact that they were associated with the production of muons instead of electrons.

After the discovery of the CP violation (1964), he turned to researching it in the Kaon system, first in a sabbatical year at CERN with Carlo Rubbia and others. They investigated the temporal interference of the mixing states during the decay of the neutral kaon (see kaon). He was also able to measure the epsilon parameter of the kaon system (mixing parameters of K 1 and K 2 ) in Brookhaven, which is important for CP violation . In 1968 Steinberger joined CERN and continued to investigate the kaon decay with the multi- wire proportional chambers introduced by Georges Charpak .

From 1976 he led the CDHS experiment at CERN (CERN-Dortmund-Heidelberg-Saclay) for high-energy neutrino scattering. The experiment ran until 1983 and, among other things, provided the first precise determination of the Weinberg angle , showed the existence of right-handed neutral currents and measured structural functions for the quark content of nucleons.

He was also involved in the NA31 experiment at CERN (first direct evidence of CP violation, finally confirmed by its successor NA48).

From 1983 he was CERN spokesman for the Aleph collaboration at the LEP , which was active from 1989 to 2000.

Later he also dealt with cosmology .

Honors and memberships

In 1968 he was elected a corresponding member of the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences . In 1969 Steinberger was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and he was a member of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA. In 1991 he became a full member of the Academia Europaea . He received honorary doctorates from the Universities of Dortmund, Glasgow, Barcelona, ​​the Illinois Institute of Technology and Columbia University. He received the National Medal of Science (1988) and the Matteucci Medal (1989).

Others

Steinberger bust
Location: Jack Steinberger Gymnasium in Bad Kissingen

In the later years of his life, Jack Steinberger was committed to comprehensive nuclear disarmament . He played the flute. The works of Franz Schubert , Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and especially Johann Sebastian Bach were his favorites in classical music. Jack Steinberger gave singing evenings together with his Geneva colleagues Volker Soergel and Wolfgang Kummer in the 1980s. He played tennis, was a mountaineer and was a passionate sailor.

At the invitation of the then Lord Mayor Georg Straus , Jack Steinberger visited Bad Kissingen in 1989, and since then he and his wife, Cynthia, have maintained close contact with his native town. In his honor, on the occasion of his 80th birthday, the "Gymnasium Bad Kissingen" was renamed to " Jack Steinberger Gymnasium " in November 2001 . Jack Steinberger has been an honorary citizen of the city since December 18, 2006 .

He had two sons from his first marriage to Joan Beauregard and a son and a daughter from his second marriage to the biologist Cynthia Alff (she was also involved in his experiments as a student).

publication

  • Learning about Particles: 50 privileged years , Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, New York 2005 ISBN 3-54021329-5 .

Web links

Commons : Jack Steinberger  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Interview with Steinberger, Süddeutsche Zeitung, 2013, No. 11
  2. ^ Siegfried Farkas: Memories of a special Kissinger. In: Mainpost.de. December 15, 2020, accessed December 16, 2020 .
  3. ^ Steinberger, On the Range of the Electrons in Meson Decay, Phys. Rev. Vol. 75, 1949, p. 1136, abstract
  4. ^ Steinberger, On the Use of Subtraction Fields and the Lifetimes of Some Types of Meson Decay, Phys. Rev., Volume 76, 1949, p. 1180, abstract
  5. ↑ J. Steinberger, WKH Panofsky, J. Steller, Evidence for the production of neutral mesons by photons, Physical Review, Volume 78, 1950, p. 802
  6. ↑ O. Chamberlain, RF Mozley, J. Steinberger, C. Wiegand, A Measurement of the Positive π − μ-Decay Lifetime, Physical Review, Volume 79, 1950, p. 394, [1]
  7. ↑ C. Chedester, P. Isaacs, A. Sachs, J. Steinberger, Total cross-sections of π-mesons on protons and several other nuclei, Physical Review, Volume 82, 1951, p. 958
  8. ↑ W. Chinkowsky, J. Steinberger, The mass difference of neutral and negative π meson, Physical Review, vol 93, 1954, p 586
  9. ↑ R. Plano, N. Samios, M. Schwartz, J. Steinberger, demonstration of the existence of the Σ0 hyperon and a measurement of its mass, Nuovo Cimento, Volume 5, 1957, p 216
  10. ↑ F. Eisler, R. Plano, A. Prodell, N. Samios, M. Schwartz, J. Steinberger, P. Bassi, V. Borelli, G. Puppi, G. Tanaka, P. Woloschek, V. Zoboli, M Conversi, P. Franzini, I. Mannelli, R. Santangelo, V. Silvestrini, DA Glaser, C. Graves, ML Perl: Demonstration of Parity Nonconservation in Hyperon Decay, Phys. Rev., Volume 108, 1957, p. 1353
  11. ↑ G. Danby; J.-M. Gaillard; K. Goulianos; LM Lederman; NB Mistry; M. Schwartz; J. Steinberger, Observation of high-energy neutrino reactions and the existence of two kinds of neutrinos, Physical Review Letters, Volume 9, 1962, p. 36
  12. ↑ C. Alff-Steinberger et al. a., KS and KL interference in the π + π− decay mode, CP invariance and the KS − KL mass difference, Physics Letters, Volume 20, 1966, p. 207
  13. ↑ C. Alff-Steinberger et al. a., Further results from the interference of KS and KL in the π + π− decay modes, Physics Letters, Volume 21, 1966, p. 595
  14. ^ S. Bennett; D. Nygren; H. Hall; J. Steinberger; J. Sutherland, Measurement of the charge asymmetry in the decay K0L → π ± + e - / + + ν ", Physical Review Letters, Volume 19, 1967, p. 993
  15. ^ American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Book of Members ( PDF ). Retrieved April 21, 2016
  16. ^ "Wolfgang Kummer 1935–2007" , TU Vienna , July 26, 2007
personal data
SURNAME Steinberger, Jack
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Steinberger, Hans Jakob (maiden name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American physicist and Nobel Prize winner
DATE OF BIRTH May 25, 1921
PLACE OF BIRTH Bad Kissingen
DATE OF DEATH December 12, 2020
Place of death Geneva