Researchers From UCI Accept the Nobel Prize : Science: Among those on hand in Stockholm to receive the prestigious awards are Fred Reines, a winner in physics, and Sherwood Rowland, honored in chemistry.

UC Irvine researchers Fred Reines and Sherwood Rowland accepted Nobel Prizes in physics and chemistry Sunday, marking the first time a public university has received the coveted award in two fields within the same year.

Reines and Stanford University’s Martin Perl, who have known each other for 30 years and share the 1995 Nobel Prize in physics, walked across the stage together at a concert hall in Stockholm to collect their awards from Sweden’s King Carl XVI Gustaf.

“We’re very good friends and have always supported each other a lot,” Perl said in a telephone interview Sunday. “We were both amazed to be there.”

Reines’ wife, Sylvia, said, “My daughter was crying. It was a very touching experience for all of us.”

Reines, 77, was recognized for tracking down an elusive subatomic particle called a neutrino, and Perl was rewarded for his discovery of the tau, an electron that weighs 100 times more than an ordinary electron.

Both men were honored for “outstanding contributions” in lepton physics during a ceremony at the Stockholm Concert House, which on Sunday was festooned with gladioli, carnations and gerbera daisies, and filled with the music of Mozart and Haydn.

Afterward, Reines’ 5-year-old granddaughter gently hugged the frail-looking scientist around the legs as he stood to receive a stream of congratulations.

Rowland, also a UCI professor, was recognized for his work in chemistry with co-winners Mario Molina of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Paul J. Crutzen of the Netherlands.

The three were honored for discovering that chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) used as refrigerants and propellants in spray cans were eating a hole in the ozone layer that protects the earth from deadly rays emanating from the sun. They sounded an alarm about the depletion of the earth’s protective layer, prompting a worldwide ban on CFCs that will go into effect next year.

“In the words of Alfred Nobel’s will, your work has been of very great benefit to mankind,” professor Ingemar Grenthe of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences told the trio during the ceremony.

About 1,800 guests--the men in tuxedos and women in evening gowns--attended the event named after Alfred Nobel, who patented dynamite, and held on the inventor’s birthday. The prize is worth $1.1 million and co-winners share the money.

Of the 11 Nobel winners this year, seven were Americans and the others were from Northern Ireland, Germany, Britain and the Netherlands.

In introducing Reines, professor Carl Nordling of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences credited the UCI professor emeritus for detecting the neutrino along with the late C. L. Cowan.

Although no one had detected them before, Reines theorized that a nuclear reactor must emit copious quantities of neutrinos. During the 1950s, he and Cowan developed a method for capturing at least a few of these elusive particles, Nordling said.

“It was a long-awaited discovery,” Nordling said in introducing Reines. “For nearly 25 years, physicists had been waiting for someone to accomplish this feat.”

Reines and Rowland were not taking calls from journalists Sunday.