Nobel Laureates Fred Reines and Sherry Rowland
On October 11, 1995 it was announced that the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to Prof. Frederick Reines of U. C. Irvine and Prof. Martin Perl of Stanford University. By an amazing coincidence, it was also announced that Prof. F. Sherwood Rowland of UCI was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry along with former postdoctorate fellow, now Prof. Mario Molina of MIT, and Prof. Paul Crutzen of the Max-Planck-Institute for Chemistry, Mainz, Germany. Fred Reines was cited for the discovery of the neutrino. Martin Perl of Stanford led the group at SLAC at Stanford which discovered the tau, a massive lepton which behaves like the electron.
That morning, a news conference was held in Physical Sciences I with national and local media. Chancellor Laurel Wilkening in her introduction stated that this was the greatest day for U. C. Irvine since its founding. Later she stated that our goal of being in the top 50 universities had been reached, and our new goal was the top 20. Prof. Rowland spoke first at the news conference, followed by Profs. Henry Sobel, Jonas Schultz, Myron Bander, and Jon Lawrence representing Fred Reines, who was in the hospital, and has now recovered. The news conference was followed by a joyous party.
The awarding of the Nobel Prizes to UCI faculty was covered by front page stories in the L.A. Times and in the Orange County Register, and on the local and national television news.
The next day, Chancellor Wilkening made a congratulatory introduction to the Representative Assembly of the Academic Senate, and Prof. Rowland spoke. He also cited Prof. Reines' great contribution to U. C. Irvine as its founding Dean of Physical Sciences. That was followed by a reception in the Chancellor's office including former University President Jack Peltason, university administrators, and the research groups headed by Profs. Reines and Rowland. On October 25, the Chancellor held a picnic in Aldrich Park to celebrate the Nobel laureates. Fred Reines' son Robert spoke on Fred's behalf, with Mrs. Sylvia Reines attending. The talks were followed by a social.
Three one-story high banners of blue lettering on gold backgrounds adorn the Physical Sciences I and II buildings congratulating Nobel laureates Reines and Rowland. Smaller banners also decorate the lampposts.
The main awards ceremony occurred in Stockholm, Sweden on December 10, the anniversary of Alfred Nobel's death. His Majesty the King of Sweden handed each laureate a diploma and a medal. This was followed by a large banquet at the Stockholm City Hall. The Nobel Lectures will be published in "Les Prix Nobel" series.
The Nobel announcement by the Royal Academy of Sweden and their description of the neutrino experiment of Reines and of atmospheric chemistry for Rowland are on the World Wide Web and are linked to from the UCI Physical Sciences homepage http://www.physsci.uci.edu/. A description of the experiment discovering the neutrino is presented in another article of this newsletter.
Fred Reines was born in 1918 in Paterson, New Jersey. He received his M.E. from Stevens Institute of Technology in 1939 and his M.S. there in 1941. His Ph.D. in Physics was earned at New York University in 1944. His thesis adviser was Prof. R.D. Present, and his thesis was titled "The Liquid Drop Model for Nuclear Fission". From 1944-59 he was a staff member and Group Leader of the Theoretical Division of Los Alamos Scientific Lab. In 1959 he became the Head of the Physics Department at Case Institute of Technology.
In 1966 he came to UC Irvine as the Founding Dean of Physical Sciences and served in that position until 1974 during which the first faculties of Physics, Chemistry and Math were recruited and Physical Sciences I was built. Prof. Reines retired in 1988 as Distinguished Emeritus Professor of Physics and he has remained active in physics.
Prof. Reines has received numerous major awards for his outstanding research career. Early awards were selection as an APS Fellow in 1957, a Guggenheim Fellow in 1958 and a Sloan Fellow in 1959. He received the Distinguished Faculty Lecturer from UCI in 1979, became a Fellow of AAAS in 1979, and became a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 1980. He receive the J. Robert Oppenheimer Prize in 1981 and the UCI Medal for Outstanding Research in 1985. In 1985 he was awarded the National Medal of Science by President Ronald Reagan. In 1989 he and the IMB detector group along with the Kamiokande group in Japan received the Bruno Rossi Prize from the American Astronomical Society for the detection of neutrinos from the supernova 1987A.
Prof. Reines has received the Michelson-Morley Award, the W.K.H. Panofsky Prize, the Franklin Medal, and in 1994 became a Foreign Member of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
The neutrino group is continuing their tradition of groundbreaking (and often underground) research. The IMB group has joined the group of the new huge (40m high by 40m diameter) SuperKamiokande water Cherenkov detector in Japan, which will search for proton decay, detect solar neutrinos, await another supernova, and further explore the anomalous ratio of muon versus electron type neutrinos produced in the atmosphere from cosmic rays. Proton decay into perhaps a positron and a neutral pion would be evidence for a Grand Unified theory of electroweak and strong (quark-gluon) interactions with fundamental particle multiplets that contained both quarks and leptons. The solar neutrino deficit and the anomalous atmospheric neutrinos could be evidence that neutrinos have mass and can oscillate between the electron, muon and tau types.
The researchers for SuperK are Prof. Henry Sobel, Bill Kropp, Leroy Price, Wojciech Gajewski, Peter Halverson, and Danka Kielczewska. This group is also collaborating on the long baseline neutrino oscillation experiment that will use a muon neutrino beam, generated by pion decay from a 12 GeV proton beam at the KEK accelerator in Tsukuba, Japan. If neutrino oscillations occur, the neutrino could be detected as an electron neutrino 250 km away in the SuperKamiokande detector, or there would be a deficit in the muon neutrino flux.
Mike Moe is beginning a new experiment for neutrinoless double beta decay having previously been the first in a laboratory to detect normal double beta decay, which is the rarest process ever detected. Neutrinoless double beta decay would proceed by emission of a virtual neutrino in one beta decay which is internally absorbed as an antineutrino to cause the other beta decay. A signal would indicate that neutrinos were their own antiparticles, that lepton number was violated, and that neutrinos had mass.
Further neutrino oscillation experiments are being performed at the reactor at Bugey, France, where deuteron targets are used, and at the CHOOZ reactor in France where there is a long baseline (1km) experiment. Dick Greenwood, Steve Riley, Henry Sobel, Bill Kropp, and Leroy Price are the researchers there.
Another neutrino experiment of UCI in collaboration with other groups is called AMANDA and involves Profs. Steve Barwick and Gaurang Yodh and postdoctoral researcher Pat Mock. It is a set of phototubes lowered into 1.5 km deep holes melted into the ice below the South Pole, to detect muons created from neutrinos of cosmic origin. The neutrinos might be produced from the decays of weakly interaction massive particles (WIMPS, which are dark matter candidates) condensed at the sun's core. They could also detect diffuse and point source neutrino radiation from active galactic nuclei, and neutrinos from supernovas.
Martin Perl discovered the tau lepton at SLAC in 1974-75 . The tau behaves like the electron and muon, and in its decay produces the associated tau neutrino. The tau and its neutrino along with the bottom quark and the top quark (discovered at Fermilab in 1994) make up the third generation. See the associated article "Fred Reines and the Neutrino" for further information on the lifetime of work in neutrino experiments of Prof. Reines and the UC Irvine neutrino and proton decay group.