Steinberger, Jack (1921-2020), was a German-born American physicist who made a career of studying the reactions of subatomic particles. In 1960, Steinberger collaborated with a team of physicists, including Leon Lederman and Melvin Schwartz , trying to detect elusive particles known as neutrinos. Their aim was to further their study of 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 to create a high-intensity beam of neutrinos. As a result of their experiments, they discovered a second type of neutrino which is produced in reactions involving a particle called the muon. For this work, Schwartz, Lederman, and Steinberger shared the 1988 Nobel Prize for physics.
Hans Jakob Steinberger was born on May 25, 1921, into a small Jewish community at Bad Kissingen, Germany. In 1933, the Nazis came to power in Germany and began a persecution of the Jews. The following year, Jack and his older brother were among a party of 300 German refugee children offered a home by Jewish American charities. In 1938, his parents and younger brother escaped from Germany, and the family settled in Chicago.
Steinberger studied chemical engineering for two years at the Armour Institute of Technology (now the Illinois Institute of Technology). In 1942, he left the University of Chicago with a degree in chemistry. He joined the U.S. Army in 1942, and was assigned to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) radiation laboratory. In 1945, Steinberger returned to study subatomic particles at the University of Chicago. He received his Ph.D. there in 1948.
After a short period at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, Steinberger began a year of work at the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory of the University of California at Berkeley in 1949. There, he studied the behavior of another kind of elementary particle, the pion. Steinberger’s stay at Berkeley ended when he refused to sign an anti-Communist loyalty oath in 1950. He moved on to Columbia University, New York City, where he began work with others on the detection and study of neutrinos.
In 1968, Steinberger moved to CERN, (the European Organization for Nuclear Research), located near Geneva, Switzerland. At CERN, Steinberger led teams that designed and built huge particle detectors. Steinberger died on Dec. 12, 2020.
