Melvin Schwartz,co-winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics. In 1962,Schwartz,with Leon Lederman and Jack Steinberger,at the time all at Columbia University,discovered the muon neutrino at the Alternating Gradient Synchrotron (AGS),the then brand-new accelerator at the U.S. Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory. The three researchers shared the 1988 Nobel Prize for this discovery. First coming to Brookhaven in 1955,Schwartz performed his Ph.D. thesis research through 1956 at the Laboratory's first accelerator,the Cosmotron. While finishing his thesis,he was employed by the Laboratory from 1956-58. Returning to Columbia University,Schwartz continued to do research at Brookhaven,working at the AGS from 1958-63. He was extremely influential in molding the experimental program at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC),Brookhaven's world-class accelerator used to explore matter as it existed at the beginning of the universe |