Schwartz, Melvin (1932-2006), was an American physicist who studied the reactions of subatomic particles. In 1960, Schwartz collaborated with a team of people, including fellow Americans Leon Lederman and Jack Steinberger, trying to detect elusive particles known as neutrinos. Using a beam of neutrinos, the team discovered a new kind of neutrino called a muon, and new information about the structure of particles called leptons. For this work, Schwartz, Lederman, and Steinberger shared the Nobel Prize in physics in 1988.
A neutrino is a subatomic particle that has no electrical charge and a tiny but undetermined mass. Neutrinos are produced when unstable atomic nuclei or subatomic particles disintegrate. Schwartz and his team wanted to study the “weak” nuclear force that creates certain kinds of radioactivity. At the Brookhaven National Accelerator Laboratory on Long Island, New York, the team used a particle accelerator (an electric device that speeds up the movement of atomic particles) to create a high-intensity beam of neutrinos. The reactions produced when this beam hit other matter led to the team’s discoveries.
Schwartz was born on Nov. 2, 1932, in New York City. He graduated from Columbia University with a bachelor’s degree in 1953 and a Ph.D. in 1958. From 1956 to 1958, Scwartz worked as a research scientist at Brookhaven National Laboratory. He then returned to Columbia as assistant professor of physics and in 1963 became full professor. Three years later, he moved to Stanford University in California as professor of physics.
Schwartz left Stanford in 1983 to become chief executive at Digital Pathways Inc., a California-based digital communications company that he had set up in 1970. He left the company in 1991 and returned to Columbia as professor of physics. While at Columbia, he renewed his connection with Brookhaven, becoming associate director for high energy and nuclear physics. His main experiments during the 1990’s involved creating quark-gluon plasmas, tiny areas of intense heat, in an attempt to understand how the universe began. Schwartz died on Aug. 28, 2006.
