Jack Steinberger

Jack Steinberger shared the 1988 Nobel Prize in Physics with Leon Lederman and Melvin Schwartz for the 1962 discovery of the muon neutrino. Their experiment at Brookhaven National Laboratory proved that more than one type of neutrino exists.

In 1962, Steinberger, Lederman, and Schwartz used the Alternating Gradient Synchrotron at Brookhaven National Laboratory to produce a beam of high-energy neutrinos from pion decay. They detected that these neutrinos consistently produced muons but never electrons, demonstrating that they were a different type from the electron neutrino.

Jack Steinberger spent much of his career at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland, where he worked from the 1960s onward. Earlier, he worked at Columbia University and at Brookhaven National Laboratory, where the muon neutrino experiment was conducted.

Yes, Steinberger led the NA31 experiment at CERN, which measured direct CP violation in neutral kaon decays. The experiment published results in 1988 showing direct CP violation, confirming and extending earlier hints from other experiments.

Jack Steinberger was born on May 25, 1921, in Bad Kissingen, Germany, to a Jewish family. He left Germany in 1934 as part of the Kindertransport and settled in the United States, where he became a citizen and pursued his education.

Steinberger earned his PhD from the University of Chicago in 1948, studying under Enrico Fermi. He then worked at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton before joining Columbia University.

Throughout his career, Steinberger made important contributions to particle physics including work on pions, neutral kaons, and the structure of the weak interaction. His experiments at CERN also contributed to understanding CP violation and the quark model.

Yes, Steinberger was the founding spokesperson of the ALEPH experiment at CERN's Large Electron-Positron Collider (LEP), which operated from 1989 to 2000. ALEPH made precise measurements of the Z boson and contributed to confirming the Standard Model of particle physics.