Jack Steinberger

88
Jack Steinberger bigraphy, stories - Swiss physicist

Jack Steinberger : biography

May 25, 1921 –

Hans Jakob "Jack" Steinberger (born May 25, 1921) is a German-American-Swiss physicist currently residing near Geneva, Switzerland. He co-discovered the muon neutrino, along with Leon Lederman and Melvin Schwartz, for which they were given the 1988 Nobel Prize in Physics.

Life

Steinberger was born in the city of Bad Kissingen in Bavaria, Germany, in 1921. The rise of the Nazi party in Germany, with its open anti-Semitism, prompted his parents, Berta and Ludwig Steinberger, who was a cantor and religious teacher,http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/1988/steinberger-autobio.html to send him out of the country.

Steinberger emigrated to the United States at the age of 13, making the trans-Atlantic trip with his brother Herbert. Barnett Farroll cared for him as a foster child, the connection was made by Jewish charities in the United States. During this period, Steinberger attended New Trier Township High School, in Winnetka, Illinois.

Steinberger studied chemical engineering at Armour Institute of Technology (now Illinois Institute of Technology) but left after his scholarship ended to help supplement his family’s income. He obtained a bachelor’s degree in Chemistry from the University of Chicago, in 1942. Shortly thereafter, he joined the Signal Corps at MIT. With the help of the G.I. Bill, he returned to graduate studies at the University of Chicago in 1946, where he studied under Edward Teller and Enrico Fermi. His Ph.D. thesis concerned the energy spectrum of electrons emitted in muon decay; his results showed that this was a three-body decay, and implied the participation of two neutral particle in the decay (later identified as the electron () and muon () neutrinos) rather than one.

Publications

  • Steinberger, J. & A. S. Bishop. , Radiation Laboratory, University of California-Berkeley, United States Department of Energy (through predecessor agency the Atomic Energy Commission), (March 8, 1950).
  • Steinberger, J., W. K. H. Panofsky & J. Steller. , Radiation Laboratory, University of California-Berkeley, United States Department of Energy (through predecessor agency the Atomic Energy Commission), (April 1950).
  • Panofsky, W. K. H., J. Steinberger & J. Steller. , Radiation Laboratory, University of California-Berkeley, United States Department of Energy (through predecessor agency the Atomic Energy Commission), (October 1, 1950).
  • Steinberger, J. , Columbia University, Nevis Laboratories, United States Department of Energy (through predecessor agency the Atomic Energy Commission), (June 1964).

Nobel Prize

Jack Steinberger was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in the year 1988, "for the neutrino beam method and the demonstration of the doublet structure of the leptons through the discovery of the muon neutrino". He shares this prize with Leon M. Lederman and Melvin Schwartz. At the time, all three experimenters were at Columbia University.

The experiment used charged pion beams generated with the Alternating Gradient Synchrotron (AGS) at Brookhaven National Laboratory. The pions decayed to muons which were detected in front of a steel wall; the neutrinos were detected in spark chambers installed behind the wall. The coincidence of muons and neutrinos demonstrated that a second kind of neutrino was created in association with muons. Subsequent experiments proved this neutrino to be distinct from the first kind (electron-type). Steinberger, Lederman and Schwartz published their work in Physical Review Letters in 1962.

He gave his Nobel medal to New Trier High School in Winnetka, Illinois (USA), of which he is an alumnus.

Investigations of strange particles

During 1954–1955, Steinberger contributed to the development of the bubble chamber with the construction of a 15 cm device for use with the Cosmotron at Brookhaven National Laboratory. The experiment used a pion beam to produce pairs of hadrons with strange quarks in order to elucidate the puzzling production and decay properties of these particles.