UCI Physicist Honored for Neutrino Discovery
A Philadelphia research institute has selected UC Irvine physics professor Frederick Reines as the 1992 recipient of its prestigious Franklin Medal for reshaping knowledge of matter by discovering subatomic particles called neutrinos.
In addition to giving Reines, 73, its coveted international award, the Franklin Institute will honor his work in a special two-day symposium on neutrinos to be held immediately after the April 29 awards ceremony at the institute in Philadelphia.
“We think this is a really big deal,” said Harold Moore, UCI dean of physical sciences, who noted that Reines is in good company. Since the award began in 1914, recipients have included inventor Thomas Edison, physicist Albert Einstein and physicist Niels Bohr.
Though he has won many scientific prizes before, Reines said Wednesday that he did not expect this one. When he opened the official notification letter several days ago, the modest physicist said his reaction was: “holy smokes!”
A distinguished professor emeritus, Reines works with his “neutrino group” of a dozen researchers, directing more than $2 million in grants this year. Reines suggested Thursday that his UCI co-researchers should also be honored when he receives the medal.
Reines was 37 and a researcher at New Mexico’s Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory when he and the late Clyde L. Cowan Jr. made the discovery that secured them a place in scientific history.
Until then, physicists had only theorized that subatomic particles exist that can move at the speed of light. They also postulated that these tiny bits of matter--smaller than protons, electrons or neutrons, having no mass and bearing neither a positive nor negative charge--would never be detected.
But in 1956, Reines said, “what we did was actually measure and detect the reaction of neutrinos with matter.”
At the Los Alamos lab, he and Cowan assembled a huge vat of transparent liquid and turned on the nuclear reactor. As the atoms split apart, the men watched for “characteristic flashes of light”--evidence of neutrinos.
That discovery led to related ones. In 1987, Reines and his colleagues were elated when their “neutrino detector” (actually instruments and a lake of water at the bottom of an Ohio salt mine) captured evidence of an event that had not been seen in 400 years: a supernova, or exploding star, more than 150,000 light-years away.
Although neutrinos emitted by the sun had been detected before, these were believed to be the first neutrinos ever captured from a source outside this solar system.
In addition to continuing their work at UCI, Reines and his colleagues have set up neutrino experiments around the world, including in the deepest gold mine in South Africa.
“We want the deepest hole we can find,” Reines said, “because these cosmic rays are troublesome. They give you background noise (that hides neutrinos)--like trying to play a violin in a noisy factory.”
Lately however, Reines said, co-researchers are devising ways to filter out cosmic rays and are studying neutrinos’ stability and their interaction with other kinds of matter.
Of course, research into the basic structure of matter takes money. So although no cash grant comes with the Franklin Medal, Reines is hoping that winning the prize will make next year’s search for federal grants a little easier.
“In these perilous times, I don’t think it does any harm,” he said.
Mentioned lately as a possible candidate for a Nobel Prize, Reines is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His previous awards have included a presidential prize for physics, the National Medal of Science and the J. Robert Oppenheimer Memorial Prize.
Reines earned a doctorate in theoretical physics from New York University and in 1944-59 worked at the Los Alamos lab. In 1959 he became physics chairman at Case Institute of Technology and served there until 1965, when he joined UCI as its first dean of physical sciences.
