Lederman, Leon Max (1922-2018), was an American specialist in high energy physics, who made a career of studying the reactions of subatomic particles. He shared the 1988 Nobel Prize for physics with Melvin Schwartz and Jack Steinberger. 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 electrical charge and a tiny but undetermined mass. At the Brookhaven National Accelerator Laboratory on Long Island, New York, the team used a particle accelerator, a device that speeds up the movement of atoms and even smaller particles, to create a high-intensity beam of neutrinos. Then, 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 for physics.
Lederman was born on July 15, 1922, in New York City to immigrant Russian-Jewish parents. He studied chemistry at the City College of New York, receiving his bachelor’s degree in 1943. Lederman served for three years in the U.S. Army before entering the Graduate School of Physics at Columbia University in New York City in 1946. After receiving his Ph.D. in 1951, Lederman was invited to stay on at Columbia. From 1961 until 1979, Lederman was director of Nevis laboratories, the university’s physics department center for experimental research in high-energy physics at Irvington, New York.
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 left Columbia. For the next 10 years, he was the director of Fermilab, the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Illinois. He died on Oct. 3, 2018.
