Melvin Schwartz

Melvin Schwartz (1933-2006), American physicist and co-winner of the 1988 Nobel Prize 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. Schwartz shared the prize with his colleagues American physicists Leon Max Lederman and Jack Steinberger.

Schwartz was educated at Columbia University, New York, where he studied physics as an undergraduate and graduate student. He received his doctoral degree in 1958 under Steinberger, who later became a research colleague. Schwartz spent ten years on the faculty at Columbia and then accepted a position at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, in 1968. In 1979 he left teaching to found a business that designed security systems for computer data networks. He returned to Columbia University in 1991, also working for several years at the Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York. Melvin Schwartz died in Idaho on August 28, 2006.

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 Steinberger, Lederman, and Schwartz devised a way to capture neutrinos and use them to discover yet other particles. Using the powerful particle accelerator at the Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York, they created a beam of charged, high-energy subatomic particles called pions that decayed into other subatomic particles called muons, thereby releasing a beam of high-energy neutrinos. With a specialized detector, the team studied the neutrinos and found that neutrinos exist in more than one variety. Their discovery of the muon neutrino inspired other physicists to search—often successfully—for additional elementary particles.