Melvin Schwartz
Schwartz, Melvin (1932-) is an American physicist. He won the 1988 Nobel Prize in physics for his work on subatomic particles called neutrinos. A subatomic particle is a unit of matter smaller than an atom. Schwartz shared the prize with his research partners, the American physicists Leon Max Lederman and Jack Steinberger.
Schwartz was born on Nov. 2, 1932, in New York City. He received a B.A. degree from Columbia University in 1953.
From 1956 to 1958, Schwartz was a research scientist at Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York. He received a Ph.D. degree in physics from Columbia University in 1958 and taught physics at Columbia from 1958 to 1966.
In 1959, Schwartz came up with the idea of using neutrinos, which have no electric charge, to study the weak force, one of the four fundamental forces that govern the interaction of matter. He and his research team used a particle accelerator (an electric device that speeds up the movement of atomic particles) at Brookhaven to create a high-intensity beam of neutrinos. The reactions produced when this beam hit other matter led to the discovery of a new kind of neutrino called a muon-neutrino. Schwartz and his team also learned more about the structure of leptons, the family of particles to which neutrinos belong.
From 1966 to 1983, Schwartz was a professor of physics at Stanford University in California. In 1983, he became chief executive of Digital Pathways Inc., a California-based digital communications company that he had established in 1970. In 1991, Schwartz returned to Columbia as professor of physics and became associate director for high energy and nuclear physics at Brookhaven National Acceleratory Laboratory.