Reines, Frederick, 1918-1998

Frederick Reines was a particle physicist and educator internationally recognized for his verification of the existence of the neutrino and investigation of its properties.

Physicist (nuclear fission, free neutrinos, cosmic rays).

Physicist (nuclear fission, free neutrons, cosmic rays). Professor emeritus of physics and radiological science at University of California Irvine. Nobel laureate.

Biography

Frederick Reines was a particle physicist and educator internationally recognized for his verification of the existence of the neutrino and investigation of its properties. He was born March 16, 1918 in Paterson, New Jersey. Reines attended Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, New Jersey, where he completed his Bachelor of Science degree in Mechanical Engineering in 1939, and then went on to complete a Master's Degree in Mathematical Physics two years later. He continued his graduate studies in Physics at New York University, receiving his doctorate in 1944. His dissertation was entitled The Liquid Drop Model for Nuclear Fission.

While writing his dissertation in 1944, Reines was recruited as a staff physicist in the Theoretical Division at Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory. Although he trained as a theoretician, Reines spent his career working as an experimentalist. During his fifteen years at Los Alamos, he worked on the Manhattan project; as director of the Operation Greenhouse experiments at Eniwetok atoll; and on various experiments testing for spontaneous fission, shock waves, and cosmic and gamma rays. Reines' early neutrino experiments at Los Alamos helped to redirect the agenda of the national laboratory towards other research objectives, in that these experiments constituted the first attempt by the national laboratory to broaden its research programs to include applications in nuclear physics other than weapons production.

In 1953 Reines and his colleague Clyde Cowan began to explore the possibility of verifying the existence of neutrinos, which had been theorized earlier by Wolfgang Pauli and Enrico Fermi. The first experiments were conducted in 1953 in Hanford, Washington, using a nuclear reactor as a source for neutrinos. In 1956 Reines and Cowan confirmed the existence of the neutrino at the new Savannah River Plant reactor in South Carolina. In the following years the Savannah River Plant served as a site for numerous other experiments exploring the nature of neutrinos. Reines maintained his association with the Savannah River Plant throughout his career.

From 1959 to 1966 Reines was a professor and chair of the Department of Physics at Case Institute of Technology. In 1963 he formed a collaboration between Case and the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa (CW); when Reines left Case for the University of California, Irvine (UCI), this collaboration became known as Case-Witwatersrand-Irvine (CWI). The primary site for this collaboration, which lasted until 1979, was the East Rand Proprietary Mine (ERPM) in South Africa, and its purpose was to investigate cosmic rays.

In 1966 Reines assumed a new position as Dean of Physical Sciences at UCI. Serving as the founding Dean, he developed the curriculum, standards, and facilities, and attracted fellow scientists to the Southern California campus. Reines also continued to cultivate productive professional associations in the physics community. He served on national and regional committees for the development of particle physics and participated in conferences and workshops promoting this nascent subfield of physics. Reines was a member of, and from 1985-1988 chaired, the Scientific and Academic Advisory Committee (SAAC), which advises the President of the University of California on the administration of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), and Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL). Reines maintained his association with the LANL, as both a consultant and as adviser, throughout his career.

In the 1980s Reines initiated the formation of a new collaboration with physicists from the University of Michigan and Brookhaven National Laboratory. Known as IMB (Irvine-Michigan-Brookhaven), the primary purpose of the collaboration was to search for proton decay. Reines and Jack vander Velde of the University of Michigan initially acted as co-spokespersons for the collaboration; Reines later became the sole spokesperson. The principal site for the IMB collaboration was in a salt mine located in Painesville, Ohio. In 1987 IMB detected a burst of neutrinos from a supernova. The result of the detection of the Supernova 1987A neutrinos was the receipt in 1989 of the Rossi Prize, which the IMB collaborators shared with members of the Kamiokande collaboration in Japan.

The collaboration represented by IMB reflects Reines' scientific research priorities and also demonstrates his ability to envision future fields of investigation within physics. Reines started his proton decay research in the 1950s, when the concept was not generally accepted by the physics community as a field of inquiry. He furthered this research interest through independent proton decay experiments in the Painesville salt mine during the 1960s. When the Standard Model of Particle Physics was developed in the early 1970s, the concept of proton decay gained recognition as a valid area of scientific exploration. With the advent of this model, funding for proton decay experiments became a primary objective within the field, and IMB developed out of this interest. The time frame for Reines' earlier independent proton decay experiments in the Painesville salt mine was circa 1960 to the late 1970s, while those experiments conducted as part of the IMB collaboration occurred between the late 1970s and 1989.

Another collaboration spearheaded by Reines at UCI was the Deep Underwater Muon and Neutrino Detector (DUMAND). The primary purpose of the collaboration was to detect cosmic neutrinos. The detector was to be located on the ocean floor near Hawaii. The time period of DUMAND was the mid-1970s to 1988.

From the mid 1970s to 1998 Reines was involved in the preliminary stages of development of other collaborations such as Gamma Ray and Neutrino Detector (GRANDE); Los Alamos Meson Physics Facility (LAMPF); and Sudbury Neutrino Observatory (SNO). Most of these collaborations were not actualized in Reines' lifetime.

Throughout his career, Reines concentrated his efforts as a scientist and academic on investigating the fundamental principles of physics. His interests in the neutrino, the gravitational constant, and baryon conservation reflect his commitment to explore and verify the accepted parameters of physics. Most of the experiments represented in this collection demonstrate his capabilities as both a theorist and experimentalist.

Reines received numerous awards and honors from his colleagues and the community-at-large throughout his career. Some of the more prestigious awards were the conferment of membership in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1966); membership in the National Academy of Sciences (1980); J. Robert Oppenheimer Memorial Prize (1981); Franklin Medal (1992); National Medal of Science (1995); and the Nobel Prize in Physics (1995) for the detection of the neutrino.

Frederick Reines died on August 26, 1998. A biographical article on Reines is available through University of California: In Memoriam." (available online at http://sunsite.berkeley.edu:2020/dynaweb/teiproj/uchist/inmemoriam).

Chronology