Leon Max Lederman
Lederman, Leon Max (1922-) is an American physicist who studied the reactions of subatomic particles. He shared the 1988 Nobel Prize in physics with Melvin Schwartz and Jack Steinberger.
Lederman was born in New York City on July 15, 1922, of Russian-Jewish immigrant parents. After attending neighborhood city schools, Lederman entered City College of New York, where he majored in chemistry. He received his B.S. degree from there in 1943, then spent three years in the U.S. Army, rising to the rank of 2nd lieutenant in the Signal Corps.
After World War II (1939–1945), Lederman used the U.S. GI Bill of Rights to continue his education. He earned a master's degree in physics in 1948 from Columbia University. He studied with physicist Isidor Isaac Rabi, who won the 1944 Nobel Prize in physics for recording the magnetic properties of atomic nuclei. Lederman earned his Ph.D. degree in 1951.
Lederman remained at the university as a research associate at Nevis Laboratories, Columbia's center for experimental research in high-energy physics at Irvington, New York. The equipment at Nevis included a particle accelerator, a device that moves tiny bits of matter at extremely high speeds.
Lederman also used the 33-billion-electron-volt accelerator at Brookhaven National Accelerator Laboratory on Long Island, New York. There he discovered, in 1956, a new particle called the K-meson.
In 1958, Lederman was promoted to professor and took his first sabbatical at CERN to organize an experiment. CERN is the world's largest research center for the study of subatomic particles, located near Geneva, Switzerland.
In 1960, Lederman collaborated with a team of people, including Schwartz and Steinberger, trying to detect elusive particles known as neutrinos. A neutrino is a subatomic particle that has no electric charge and a tiny but undetermined mass. The team used the particle accelerator at Brookhaven to create a high-intensity beam of neutrinos. As a result of their experiments, they discovered a second type of neutrino that is produced in reactions involving a particle called the muon. For this work, Schwartz, Lederman, and Steinberger were awarded the 1988 Nobel Prize in physics.
Lederman became director of the Nevis Labs in 1961 and held that position until 1978. He was a guest scientist at many labs, but did most of his research at Nevis, Brookhaven, CERN, and the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) near Batavia, Illinois.
In 1977, a team led by Lederman discovered the upsilon particle (then the heaviest known subatomic particle) and another important fundamental particle, the fifth or bottom quark. Two years later, Lederman became the director of Fermilab, where he supervised the construction and operation of the first superconducting synchrotron. The synchrotron lies in an underground tunnel that forms a circle 1 1/4 miles (2 kilometers) in diameter. The synchrotron accelerates protons to almost the speed of light. Scientists either direct a beam of protons at a stationary target, or they make a beam of protons collide head-on with a beam of antiprotons. They then study the results. Fermilab's synchrotron became the highest energy accelerator in the world, and scientists from around the world came to the laboratory to perform experiments.
Lederman retired from Fermilab in 1989, to join the faculty of the University of Chicago as Professor of Physics. From 1992, he was professor of science at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago. He helped to found and served on the board of trustees of the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy. In 1989, he was appointed science adviser to the governor of Illinois. He helped to organize the Teachers Academy for Mathematics and Science. In 1990, he became president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.