Frederick Reines - Discovery of The Neutrino and The Inner Workings of Stars

Discovery of The Neutrino and The Inner Workings of Stars

In 1944 Reines began working under Richard Feynman in the Theoretical Division of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, where Reines became a group leader in 1945. In the early 1950s, working in Hanford and Savannah River laboratories, Reines and his colleague, Clyde Cowan developed the detection procedures by which they and a team of researchers in 1956 first detected neutrinos. Neutrinos had been first proposed theoretically by Wolfgang Pauli 20 years earlier to explain undetected energy that escaped when a neutron decayed into a proton and an electron. From then on Reines dedicated the major part of his career to the study of the neutrino’s properties and interactions, which work would influence study of the neutrino for future researchers to come, including the discovery of neutrinos emitted from Supernova SN1987A by the Irvine-Michigan-Brookhaven Collaboration. This discovery helped to inaugurate the field of neutrino astronomy.

On the basis of his work in first detecting the neutrino, Reines became the head of the physics department of Case Western Reserve University from 1959 to 1966. At Case, Reines led a group that was the first to detect neutrinos created in the atmosphere by cosmic rays. Reines had a booming voice, and had been a singer since childhood. During this time, besides performing his duties as a research supervisor and chairman of the physics department, Reines sang in the Cleveland Orchestra Chorus under the direction of Robert Shaw in performances with George Szell and the Cleveland Orchestra.

In 1966, Reines took most of his neutrino research team with him when he left for California to become the founding dean of physical sciences at the then new University of California, Irvine (UCI). While at UCI, Reines extended the research interests of some of his graduate students into the development of medical radiation detectors, such as for measuring total radiation delivered to the whole human body in radiation therapy.

Reines had prepared for the possibility of measuring the distant events of a supernova explosion. Supernova explosions are rare, but Reines thought he might be lucky enough to see one in his lifetime, and be able to catch the neutrinos streaming from it in his specially-designed detectors. According to a UCI obituary, during his wait for a supernova to explode, he put signs on some of his large neutrino detectors, calling them "Supernova Early Warning Systems".

In 1995, Reines was honored, along with Martin L. Perl with the Nobel Prize in Physics, and his work with Clyde Cowan in first detecting the neutrino was recognized by the National Academy of Sciences. Reines also received many other awards, including the National Medal of Science.

Reines remained on UCI's faculty until his death.