Melvin Schwartz
1932–2006, New York City, New York, USA, Twin Falls, Idaho, USA
American physicist who shared the 1988 Nobel Prize in Physics for the two-neutrino experiment, and later became an entrepreneur in computer security.
Born in New York City during the Great Depression, Schwartz earned his PhD at Columbia in 1958 under Jack Steinberger. He conceived the idea of using neutrinos as a beam to probe the weak interaction — the basis of the 1962 Brookhaven experiment. After moving to Stanford in 1966, he left academia in 1970 to found Digital Pathways, a computer-security company, before returning to physics as head of Brookhaven's high-energy and nuclear physics division in 1991.
Nobel-winning work
Schwartz originated the method that made the 1962 experiment possible: produce a pure beam of neutrinos from pion decay (π → μ + ν) and let it interact in a detector shielded from all other particles by ~13.5 m of steel from a dismantled battleship. At Brookhaven's AGS, the 10-ton aluminum spark chamber recorded only muons from neutrino interactions — the signature of a muon-specific neutrino.
This proof that ν_μ ≠ ν_e, published in Physical Review Letters (1962), doubled the number of known leptons' flavors and made high-energy neutrino scattering a standard probe of weak interactions.
Workplaces: Columbia University, Stanford University, Brookhaven National Laboratory
United States