Melvin Schwartz who shared the Nobel Prize for his studies on neutrinos

2 November 1932, New York (USA) - 28 August 2006, Twin Falls (USA)

In 1953, he graduated from Columbia University with a degree in physics and, five years later, received his doctorate under the guidance of Nobel Prize Isidor Isaac Rabi.

In the same year, he was appointed assistant professor at Columbia University and became a full professor in 1963.

Schwartz began his neutrino research under the influence of another Nobel laureate, Tsung-Dao Lee. Together with Leon Max Lederman and Jack Steinberger, he developed a method of detecting neutrinos that made it possible to demonstrate the double structure of leptons. This discovery allowed theorists to develop a scheme, known as the ‘standard model’, for the classification of all elementary particles.

Neutrinos are subatomic particles that have no electric charge and virtually no mass and are produced naturally in some radioactive decay processes, but so sparsely and with such scattered trajectories that they are of little use in research. Hence the scientists' interest in increasing the statistical probability of their interactions by creating a beam of tens of billions of neutrinos and projecting it onto solid matter through a detector.

In 1966, he left Columbia University to take a job at Stanford University, where he was able to work on the linear particle accelerator investigating charge asymmetry in the decay of neutral kaons. He also worked on a project that produced and detected relativistic hydrogen in pion and muon particles.

In 1988 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics, together with Leon Max Lederman and Jack Steinberger, for his work on the neutrino.