Jack Steinberger

Jack Steinberger, born in 1921, American physicist and co-winner 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. Steinberger shared the prize with his colleagues American physicists Leon Max Lederman and Melvin Schwartz.

Steinberger studied chemistry as an undergraduate at the University of Chicago. As a member of the United States Army he was assigned to the MIT Radiation Laboratory, which inspired his interest in physics. He returned to the University of Chicago for graduate work, earning his Ph.D. in 1948. He then conducted research at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, at the University of California at Berkeley, and at Columbia University. In 1968 he joined the staff of the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Switzerland, where he spent the remainder of his career.

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 such, elementary particles 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 charged 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.