Leon Max Lederman

Leon Max Lederman, born in 1922, American physicist and cowinner of the 1988 Nobel Prize for physics for his discovery of the muon neutrino, one of the elementary particles that make up the atom, proving the existence of more than one type of neutrino. Lederman shared the prize with his colleagues American physicists Melvin Schwartz and Jack Steinberger.

Lederman attended the City College of New York and then Columbia University, where he earned his Ph.D. degree in 1951. He joined the faculty at Columbia and directed its Nevis Laboratory from 1961 to 1978. In 1979 he became the director of the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Illinois, near Chicago and served in that position for ten years. He joined the faculty of the University of Chicago in 1989 and later the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago.

Neutrinos and other elementary particles, the basic building blocks of matter, are smaller than the particles found in the atomic nucleus (protons and neutrons). As a result, they are difficult to isolate and study. In the early 1960s Lederman, Schwartz, and Steinberger devised a way to capture neutrinos. Using the powerful particle accelerator at the Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York, they created a beam of high-energy neutrinos. With a specialized detector, Lederman and his colleagues were able to study the neutrinos and, in doing so, found that neutrinos exist in more than one variety. Their discovery of the muon neutrino inspired other physicists to search—often successfully—for additional particles.

In addition to his Nobel Prize-winning research, Lederman discovered in 1956 the long-lived neutral K-meson particle. In 1977 he found evidence for yet another elementary particle, the bottom quark.