Frederick Reines ( ; March 16, 1918 – August 26, 1998) was an American physicist. He was awarded the 1995 Nobel Prize in Physics for his co-detection of the neutrino with Clyde Cowan in the neutrino experiment. He may be the only scientist in history "so intimately associated with the discovery of an elementary particle and the subsequent thorough investigation of its fundamental properties." A graduate of Stevens Institute of Technology and New York University, Reines joined the Manhattan Project's Los Alamos Laboratory in 1944, working in the Theoretical Division in Richard Feynman's group. He became a group leader there in 1946. He participated in a number of nuclear tests, culminating in his becoming the director of the Operation Greenhouse test series in the Pacific in 1951. In the early 1950s, working in Hanford and Savannah River Sites, Reines and Cowan developed the equipment and procedures with which they first detected the supposedly undetectable neutrinos in June 1956. Reines dedicated the major part of his career to the study of the neutrino's properties and interactions, which work would influence study of the neutrino for many researchers to come. This included the detection of neutrinos created in the atmosphere by cosmic rays, and the 1987 detection of neutrinos emitted from Supernova SN1987A, which inaugurated the field of neutrino astronomy.

Early life

Frederick Reines was born in

Paterson, New Jersey Paterson ( ) is the largest City (New Jersey), city in and the county seat of Passaic County, New Jersey, Passaic County, in the U.S. state of New Jersey.New York City, where they were later married. He had an older sister, Paula, who became a doctor, and two older brothers, David and William, who became lawyers. He said that his "early education was strongly influenced" by his studious siblings. He was the great-nephew of the

Rabbi A rabbi () is a spiritual leader or religious teacher in Judaism. One becomes a rabbi by being ordained by another rabbi – known as '' semikha'' – following a course of study of Jewish history and texts such as the Talmud. The basic form o ...

Yitzchak Yaacov Reines, the founder of Mizrachi, a religious Zionist movement. The family moved to

Hillburn, New York Hillburn, originally called "Woodburn" and incorporated in 1893, is a Administrative divisions of New York#Village, village in the town of Ramapo, New York, Ramapo, Rockland County, New York, Rockland County, New York (state), New York, United St ...

, where his father ran the general store, and he spent much of his childhood. He was an Eagle Scout. Looking back, Reines said: "My early childhood memories center around this typical American country store and life in a small American town, including Independence Day July celebrations marked by fireworks and patriotic music played from a pavilion bandstand." Reines sang in a chorus, and as a soloist. For a time he considered the possibility of a singing career, and was instructed by a vocal coach from the Metropolitan Opera who provided lessons for free because the family did not have the money for them. The family later moved to North Bergen, New Jersey, residing on Kennedy Boulevard and 57th Street. Because North Bergen did not have a high school, he attended Union Hill High School in Union Hill, New Jersey (today Union City, New Jersey), from which he graduated in 1935. From an early age, Reines exhibited an interest in science, and liked creating and building things. He later recalled that:

The first stirrings of interest in science that I remember occurred during a moment of boredom at religious school, when, looking out of the window at twilight through a hand curled to simulate a telescope, I noticed something peculiar about the light; it was the phenomenon of
diffraction Diffraction is defined as the interference or bending of waves around the corners of an obstacle or through an aperture into the region of geometrical shadow of the obstacle/aperture. The diffracting object or aperture effectively becomes a s ...
. That began for me a fascination with light.

Ironically, Reines excelled in literary and history courses, but received average or low marks in science and math in his

freshman A freshman, fresher, first year, or frosh, is a person in the first year at an educational institution, usually a secondary school or at the college and university level, but also in other forms of post-secondary educational institutions. Ara ...

year of high school, though he improved in those areas by his junior and

senior Senior (shortened as Sr.) means "the elder" in Latin and is often used as a suffix for the elder of two or more people in the same family with the same given name, usually a parent or grandparent. It may also refer to: * Senior (name), a surname ...

years through the encouragement of a teacher who gave him a key to the school laboratory. This cultivated a love of science by his senior year. In response to a question seniors were asked about what they wanted to do for a yearbook quote, he responded: "To be a physicist extraordinaire." Reines was accepted into the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, but chose instead to attend Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, New Jersey, where he earned his Bachelor of Science (B.S.) degree in mechanical engineering in 1939, and his Master of Science (M.S.) degree in mathematical physics in 1941, writing a thesis on "A Critical Review of Optical Diffraction Theory". He married Sylvia Samuels on August 30, 1940. They had two children, Robert and Alisa. He then entered New York University, where he earned his Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) in 1944. He studied cosmic rays there under

Serge A. Korff Serge may refer to: *Serge (fabric), a type of twill fabric *Serge (llama) (born 2005), a llama in the Cirque Franco-Italien and internet meme *Serge (name), a masculine given name (includes a list of people with this name) *Serge (post), a hitchi ...

, but wrote his thesis under the supervision of Richard D. Present on "Nuclear fission and the liquid drop model of the nucleus". Publication of the thesis was delayed until after the end of World War II; it appeared in

Physical Review ''Physical Review'' is a peer-reviewed scientific journal established in 1893 by Edward Nichols. It publishes original research as well as scientific and literature reviews on all aspects of physics. It is published by the American Physical S ...

in 1946.

Los Alamos Laboratory

In 1944 Richard Feynman recruited Reines to work in the Theoretical Division at the Manhattan Project's Los Alamos Laboratory, where he would remain for the next fifteen years. He joined Feynman's T-4 (Diffusion Problems) Group, which was part of Hans Bethe's T (Theoretical) Division. Diffusion was an important aspect of critical mass calculations. In June 1946, he became a group leader, heading the T-1 (Theory of Dragon) Group. An outgrowth of the " tickling the Dragon's tail" experiment, the Dragon was a machine that could attain a critical state for short bursts of time, which could be used as a research tool or power source. Reines participated in a number of nuclear tests, and writing reports on their results. These included Operation Crossroads at Bikini Atoll in 1946, Operation Sandstone at

Eniwetok Atoll Enewetak Atoll (; also spelled Eniwetok Atoll or sometimes Eniewetok; mh, Ānewetak, , or , ; known to the Japanese as Brown Atoll or Brown Island; ja, ブラウン環礁) is a large coral atoll of 40 islands in the Pacific Ocean and with it ...

in 1948, and Operation Ranger and Operation Buster–Jangle at the Nevada Test Site. In 1951 he was the director of Operation Greenhouse series of nuclear tests in the Pacific. This saw the first American tests of boosted fission weapons, an important step towards thermonuclear weapons. He studied the effects of nuclear blasts, and co-authored a paper with John von Neumann on Mach stem formation, an important aspect of an air blast wave. In spite or perhaps because of his role in these nuclear tests, Reines was concerned about the dangers of radioactive pollution from atmospheric nuclear tests, and became an advocate of underground nuclear testing. In the wake of the

Sputnik crisis The Sputnik crisis was a period of public fear and anxiety in Western nations about the perceived technological gap between the United States and Soviet Union caused by the Soviets' launch of ''Sputnik 1'', the world's first artificial satelli ...

, he participated in John Archibald Wheeler's Project 137, which evolved into JASON. He was also a delegate at the Atoms for Peace Conference in Geneva in 1958.

Discovery of the neutrino and the inner workings of stars

The neutrino is a

subatomic particle In physical sciences, a subatomic particle is a particle that composes an atom. According to the Standard Model of particle physics, a subatomic particle can be either a composite particle, which is composed of other particles (for example, a pr ...

first proposed by Wolfgang Pauli on December 4, 1930. The particle was required to resolve the problem of missing energy in observations of beta decay, when a neutron decays into a

proton A proton is a stable subatomic particle, symbol , H+, or 1H+ with a positive electric charge of +1 ''e'' elementary charge. Its mass is slightly less than that of a neutron and 1,836 times the mass of an electron (the proton–electron mass ...

and an electron. The new hypothetical particle was required to preserve the fundamental law of

conservation of energy In physics and chemistry, the law of conservation of energy states that the total energy of an isolated system remains constant; it is said to be ''conserved'' over time. This law, first proposed and tested by Émilie du Châtelet, means th ...

Enrico Fermi Enrico Fermi (; 29 September 1901 – 28 November 1954) was an Italian (later naturalized American) physicist and the creator of the world's first nuclear reactor, the Chicago Pile-1. He has been called the "architect of the nuclear age" and ...

renamed it the neutrino, Italian for "little neutral one", and in 1934, proposed his theory of beta decay by which the electrons emitted from the nucleus were created by the decay of a neutron into a proton, an electron, and a neutrino: : → + + The neutrino accounted for the missing energy, but Fermi's theory described a particle with little mass and no electric charge that appeared to be impossible to observe directly. In a 1934 paper, Rudolf Peierls and Hans Bethe calculated that neutrinos could easily pass through the Earth, and concluded "there is no practically possible way of observing the neutrino." Frederick Reines Nobel Prize

In 1951, Reines and his colleague Clyde Cowan decided to see if they could detect neutrinos and so prove their existence. At the conclusion of the Greenhouse test series, Reines had received permission from the head of T Division,

J. Carson Mark Jordan Carson Mark (July 6, 1913 – March 2, 1997) was a Canadian-American mathematician best known for his work on developing nuclear weapons for the United States at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. Mark joined the Manhattan Project in 1945 ...

, for a leave in residence to study fundamental physics. "So why did we want to detect the free neutrino?" he later explained, "Because everybody said, you couldn't do it." According to Fermi's theory, there was also a corresponding reverse reaction, in which a neutrino combines with a proton to create a neutron and a

positron The positron or antielectron is the antiparticle or the antimatter counterpart of the electron. It has an electric charge of +1 '' e'', a spin of 1/2 (the same as the electron), and the same mass as an electron. When a positron collides ...

: : + → + The positron would soon be annihilated by an electron and produce two 0.51 MeV gamma rays, while the neutron would be captured by a proton and release a 2.2 MeV gamma ray. This would produce a distinctive signature that could be detected. They then realised that by adding cadmium salt to their liquid scintillator they would enhance the neutron capture reaction, resulting in a 9 MeV burst of gamma rays. For a neutrino source, they proposed using an atomic bomb. Permission for this was obtained from the laboratory director, Norris Bradbury. Work began on digging a shaft for the experiment when

J. M. B. Kellogg ''J. The Jewish News of Northern California'', formerly known as ''Jweekly'', is a weekly print newspaper in Northern California, with its online edition updated daily. It is owned and operated by San Francisco Jewish Community Publications In ...

convinced them to use a nuclear reactor instead of a bomb. Although a less intense source of neutrinos, it had the advantage in allowing for multiple experiments to be carried out over a long period of time. In 1953, they made their first attempts using one of the large reactors at the

Hanford nuclear site The Hanford Site is a decommissioned nuclear production complex operated by the United States federal government on the Columbia River in Benton County, Washington, Benton County in the U.S. state of Washington (state), Washington. The site h ...

in what is now known as the

Cowan–Reines neutrino experiment The Cowan–Reines neutrino experiment was conducted by Washington University in St. Louis alumnus Clyde L. Cowan and Stevens Institute of Technology and New York University alumnus Frederick Reines in 1956. The experiment confirmed the existenc ...

. Their detector now included of scintillating fluid and 90 photomultiplier tubes, but the effort was frustrated by background noise from cosmic rays. With encouragement from

John A. Wheeler John Archibald Wheeler (July 9, 1911April 13, 2008) was an American theoretical physicist. He was largely responsible for reviving interest in general relativity in the United States after World War II. Wheeler also worked with Niels Bohr in e ...

, they tried again in 1955, this time using one of the newer, larger 700 MW reactors at the Savannah River Site that emitted a high neutrino flux of 1.2 x 10¹² / cm² sec. They also had a convenient, well-shielded location from the reactor and underground. On June 14, 1956, they were able to send Pauli a telegram announcing that the neutrino had been found. When Bethe was informed that he had been proven wrong, he said, "Well, you shouldn't believe everything you read in the papers." Supernova SN1987A in the Large Magellanic Cloud - GPN-2000-000948

Supernova SN1987A in the Large Magellanic Cloud - GPN-2000-000948

From then on Reines dedicated the major part of his career to the study of the neutrino's properties and interactions, which work would influence study of the neutrino for future researchers to come. Cowan left Los Alamos in 1957 to teach at George Washington University, ending their collaboration. On the basis of his work in first detecting the neutrino, Reines became the head of the physics department of

Case Western Reserve University Case Western Reserve University (CWRU) is a private research university in Cleveland, Ohio. Case Western Reserve was established in 1967, when Western Reserve University, founded in 1826 and named for its location in the Connecticut Western Reser ...

from 1959 to 1966. At Case, he led a group that was the first to detect neutrinos created in the atmosphere by cosmic rays. Reines had a booming voice, and had been a singer since childhood. During this time, besides performing his duties as a research supervisor and chairman of the physics department, Reines sang in the Cleveland Orchestra Chorus under the direction of Robert Shaw in performances with George Szell and the Cleveland Orchestra. In 1966, Reines took most of his neutrino research team with him when he left for the new University of California, Irvine (UCI), becoming its first dean of physical sciences. At UCI, Reines extended the research interests of some of his graduate students into the development of medical radiation detectors, such as for measuring total radiation delivered to the whole human body in radiation therapy. Reines had prepared for the possibility of measuring the distant events of a supernova explosion. Supernova explosions are rare, but Reines thought he might be lucky enough to see one in his lifetime, and be able to catch the neutrinos streaming from it in his specially-designed detectors. During his wait for a supernova to explode, he put signs on some of his large neutrino detectors, calling them "Supernova Early Warning Systems". In 1987, neutrinos emitted from Supernova SN1987A were detected by the Irvine–Michigan–Brookhaven (IMB) Collaboration, which used an 8,000 ton

Cherenkov detector A Cherenkov detector (pronunciation: /tʃɛrɛnˈkɔv/; Russian: Черенко́в) is a particle detector using the speed threshold for light production, the speed-dependent light output or the speed-dependent light direction of Cherenkov radi ...

located in a salt mine near Cleveland. Normally, the detectors recorded only a few background events each day. The supernova registered 19 events in just ten seconds. This discovery is regarded as inaugurating the field of neutrino astronomy. In 1995, Reines was honored, along with

Martin L. Perl Martin Lewis Perl (June 24, 1927 – September 30, 2014) was an American chemical engineer and physicist who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1995 for his discovery of the tau lepton. Life and career Perl was born in New York City, New York. H ...

with the Nobel Prize in Physics for his work with Cowan in first detecting the neutrino. Unfortunately, Cowan had died in 1974, and the Nobel Prize is not awarded posthumously. Reines also received many other awards, including the

J. Robert Oppenheimer Memorial Prize The J. Robert Oppenheimer Memorial Prize and Medal was awarded by the Center for Theoretical Studies, University of Miami, from 1969, until 1984. Established in memory of US physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, the award consisted of a medal, certific ...

in 1981, the National Medal of Science in 1985, the Bruno Rossi Prize in 1989, the Michelson–Morley Award in 1990, the Panofsky Prize in 1992, and the Franklin Medal in 1992. He was elected a member of the

National Academy of Sciences The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) is a United States nonprofit, non-governmental organization. NAS is part of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, along with the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) and the Nati ...

in 1980 and a foreign member of the Russian Academy of Sciences in 1994. He remained dean of physical sciences at UCI until 1974, and became a professor emeritus in 1988, but he continued teaching until 1991, and remained on UCI's faculty until his death.

Death

Reines died after a long illness at the University of California, Irvine Medical Center in Orange, California, on August 26, 1998. He was survived by his wife and children. His papers are compiled in the UCI Libraries. Frederick Reines Hall, which houses the Physics and Astronomy Department at the University of California, Irvine, was named in his honor.

Publications

* Reines, F. & C. L. Cowan, Jr
"On the Detection of the Free Neutrino"
Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) (through predecessor agency Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory), United States Department of Energy (through predecessor agency the Atomic Energy Commission), (August 6, 1953). * Reines, F., Cowan, C. L. Jr., Carter, R. E., Wagner, J. J. & M. E. Wyman
"The Free Antineutrino Absorption Cross Section. Part I. Measurement of the Free Antineutrino Absorption Cross Section. Part II. Expected Cross Section from Measurements of Fission Fragment Electron Spectrum"
Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) (through predecessor agency Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory), United States Department of Energy (through predecessor agency the Atomic Energy Commission), (June 1958). * Reines, F., Gurr, H. S., Jenkins, T. L. & J. H. Munsee
"Neutrino Experiments at Reactors"
University of California-Irvine,

, United States Department of Energy (through predecessor agency the Atomic Energy Commission), (September 9, 1968). * Roberts, A., Blood, H., Learned, J. & F. Reines
"Status and Aims of the DUMAND Neutrino Project: the Ocean as a Neutrino Detector"
Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (FNAL), United States Department of Energy (through predecessor agency the

Energy Research and Development Administration The United States Energy Research and Development Administration (ERDA) was a United States government organization formed from the split of the United States Atomic Energy Commission, Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) in 1975. It assumed the functio ...

), (July 1976). *

Notes

References

* *

External links

Guide to the Frederick Reines Papers.
Special Collections and Archives, The UC Irvine Libraries, Irvine, California. * including the Nobel Lecture, December 8, 1995 ''The Neutrino: From Poltergeist to Particle'' {{DEFAULTSORT:Reines, Frederick 1918 births 1998 deaths Nobel laureates in Physics American Nobel laureates American people of Russian-Jewish descent 20th-century American physicists Case Western Reserve University faculty Jewish American scientists Jewish physicists National Medal of Science laureates New York University alumni People from Union City, New Jersey People from Paterson, New Jersey People from Rockland County, New York Stevens Institute of Technology alumni Union Hill High School alumni University of California, Irvine faculty Members of the United States National Academy of Sciences Foreign Members of the Russian Academy of Sciences Winners of the Panofsky Prize Manhattan Project people Cold War history of the United States Scientists from New York (state)