Jack Steinberger was a German-American physicist who was born on May 25, 1921, in Bad Kissingen, Germany, and passed away on December 12, 2020, in Geneva, Switzerland. He was known for his significant contributions to the field of particle physics, particularly his involvement in the discovery of the muon neutrino and his research on weak interactions.
Steinberger fled Nazi Germany with his family in 1934 and eventually settled in the United States. He earned his bachelor's degree in chemistry from the University of Chicago in 1942. During World War II, he worked on the Manhattan Project at the Los Alamos Laboratory, where he contributed to the development of the atomic bomb.
After the war, Steinberger pursued a career in physics. He obtained his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1948 and went on to conduct research at various institutions, including Columbia University and the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva, Switzerland.
One of Steinberger's most notable achievements came in the 1960s when he, along with Leon M. Lederman and Melvin Schwartz, conducted experiments at Brookhaven National Laboratory that led to the discovery of the muon neutrino. Their research demonstrated the existence of a second type of neutrino particle, which was previously unknown. This discovery earned them the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1988.
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