Melvin Schwartz
| Melvin Schwartz | |
|---|---|
| Born |
November 2, 1932 New York City, New York |
| Died | August 28, 2006 (aged 73) Twin Falls, Idaho |
| Nationality | American |
| Fields | Particle physics |
| Institutions |
Brookhaven National Laboratory Stanford University Columbia University |
| Alma mater | Columbia University |
| Doctoral advisor | Jack Steinberger |
| Known for | Neutrinos |
| Notable awards | Nobel Prize in Physics (1988) |
| Spouse | Marilyn (3 children) |
Melvin Schwartz (November 2, 1932 – August 28, 2006) was an American physicist. He shared the 1988 Nobel Prize in Physics with Leon M. Lederman and Jack Steinberger for their development of the neutrino beam method and their demonstration of the doublet structure of the leptons through the discovery of the muon neutrino.
He grew up in New York City in the Great Depression and went to the Bronx High School of Science. His interest in physics began there at the age of 12.
He earned his B.A. (1953) and Ph.D. (1958) at Columbia University, where Nobel laureate I. I. Rabi was the head of the physics department. Schwartz became an assistant professor at Columbia in 1958. He was promoted to associate professor in 1960 and full professor in 1963. Tsung-Dao Lee, a Columbia colleague who had recently won the Nobel prize at age 30, inspired the experiment for which Schwartz received his Nobel. Schwartz and his colleagues performed the experiments which led to their Nobel Prize in the early 1960s, when all three were on the Columbia faculty. The experiment was carried out at the nearby Brookhaven National Laboratory.
In 1966, after 17 years at Columbia, he moved west to Stanford University, where SLAC, a new accelerator, was just being completed. There, he was involved in research investigating the charge asymmetry in the decay of long-lived neutral kaons and another project which produced and detected relativistic hydrogen-like atoms made up of a pion and a muon.
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