October 3, 2018 - Death of Leon Max Lederman, Nobel Prize for his research on neutrinos

He graduated in Chemistry from New York University in 1943 and received his PhD in Physics from Columbia University in 1951.

In 1958 he began teaching at Columbia University and directed its Physics Research Laboratory from 1961 to 1978. In 1960, on leave from Columbia, he spent time at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva as a Ford Foundation Fellow.

His scientific research focused, together with Melvin Schwartz and Jack Steinberger, on a method of detecting neutrinos that made it possible to demonstrate the double structure of leptons. This discovery enabled theorists to devise a scheme, known as the standard model, for the classification of all elementary particles.

From 1979 to 1989 he headed the government research laboratory, Fermi National Laboratory (Fermilab) in the United States. During his tenure, in 1977, a group of physicists, the ‘E288 Experimental’ team, led by Lederman, announced that the Fermilab particle accelerator was producing a particle with a mass of about 6.0 GeV. After getting more data, the group discovered that this particle did not actually exist, and the ‘discovery’ was called ‘Oops-Leon’ as a pun on the original name and Lederman's first name.

As director of Fermilab, he was a leading advocate of the ‘Superconducting Super Collider’ project, among many others, and oversaw the construction of the Tevatron, for decades the world's highest energy particle collider.

In 1988, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics, together with Schartz and Steinberger, for their work on the neutrino.

If you want to know more about this scientist, click on the following link: Leon Max Lederman