- Person
- Frederick Reines
- Lived
- 1918–1998
- Field
- Neutrino physics
- From
- American
The story
After he and Clyde Cowan first detected the neutrino in 1956, Frederick Reines, the son of Jewish emigrants from Russia, devoted his career to studying the elusive particle. Because neutrinos pass through almost anything, they can carry information from places light cannot escape, such as the core of the Sun or the heart of a collapsing star. To catch them, detectors must be huge and buried deep underground, away from the rain of cosmic rays at the surface.
Reines became an expert at building such detectors. In the 1960s, as head of physics at the Case Institute of Technology in Cleveland, he built one in a South African gold mine more than three kilometres deep, which in February 1965 recorded the first neutrinos made by cosmic rays striking the atmosphere. In 1966 he moved to the University of California, Irvine, as founding dean of physical sciences, and his group joined the Irvine-Michigan-Brookhaven collaboration, IMB, which built an 8,000-ton water detector in a salt mine near Cleveland. Its main purpose was to look for the decay of protons, but Reines had long hoped to see a supernova and labelled some of his detectors “Supernova Early Warning System”.
On February 23, 1987, light from a star exploding in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a small galaxy near our own, reached Earth. Normally such detectors recorded only a few background events a day. Within about ten seconds, IMB and Japan’s Kamiokande detector together recorded some 19 neutrino events, a burst of neutrinos from the dying star. They were the first neutrinos ever detected from a source beyond the solar system, and they confirmed theories of how massive stars collapse.
The event is regarded as the birth of neutrino astronomy. In 1989 the American Astronomical Society awarded the Bruno Rossi Prize to the Irvine neutrino group, jointly with Kamiokande, for the observation.
Why it matters
The detection of neutrinos from Supernova 1987A opened neutrino astronomy, a new way of studying the Sun, exploding stars and the universe that is now pursued by large observatories around the world.
About Frederick Reines
New Jersey physicist who, with Clyde Cowan, first detected the neutrino, then founded neutrino astronomy; his reactor method now underpins tools to monitor nuclear reactors. Nobel Prize 1995.
More about Frederick Reines
Sources
- Frederick Reines, Biographical NobelPrize.org
- Frederick Reines Wikipedia
- Frederick Reines Jewish Virtual Library
Another act of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.