Nobel Pursuits: Frederick Reines’ Path From Hoboken to the Manhattan Project and the Neutrino Discovery
Stevens Alumnus played pivotal role during World War II and after by proving key particle’s existence, culminating with the 1995 Nobel Prize in Physics
As a child growing up moving between New Jersey and New York, Frederick Reines was a talented singer who excelled in his literature and history classes. His science grades lagged, but his curiosity in the subject was taking hold. That inquisitiveness would propel Reines into one of the most impactful scientific careers of the 20th century.
Reines embraced his interest at Union Hill School in New Jersey, where, according to a biography, a science teacher supplied him with an extra key to the school lab and listed in his yearbook his goal “to be a physicist extraordinaire.” That mission would be accomplished thanks to his studies at Stevens Institute of Technology, which he opted to attend despite acceptance to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Reines earned his Bachelor of Science in Mechanical Engineering in 1939 and his Master of Science in Physics in 1941.
Reines would go on to become one of two Stevens graduates to earn the Nobel Prize, earning the 1995 Nobel Prize in Physics. Fellow alumnus Irving Langmuir is Stevens’ other Nobel Prize winner.
"Frederick Reines' Nobel Prize-winning work was a crucial step in developing the Standard Model of particle physics," said Ting Yu, professor and chair of the Department of Physics at Stevens. "His work profoundly transformed our understanding of particle physics and left a lasting legacy in the exploration of the universe at its most fundamental level."
From Hoboken to the top-secret Manhattan Project
Following his six-year stint at Stevens, Reines earned his Ph.D. from New York University. He wrote his thesis on nuclear fission, which caught the attention of Richard Feynman at Los Alamos Laboratory in New Mexico. It was 1944 and America was embroiled in the late stages of World War II. The Manhattan Project, the top-secret program to develop the first nuclear weapon in human history, was staged at Los Alamos and Reines was recruited to work in the Theoretical Division.
The end result of the Manhattan Project is a divisive issue certainly to this day, as the controversial bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki ushered in the era of nuclear weapons. However, Reines’ research didn’t end when World War II concluded. He remained in Los Alamos for 15 years, participating in more nuclear research studies.
Reines’ work transitioned from ending World War II to the technological arms race with the Soviet Union. Reines would grow concerned about the dangers of radioactive pollution from atmospheric nuclear tests and was a delegate at the 1958 Atoms for Peace Conference in Geneva.
Neutrino and Nobel
Although Reines’ nuclear research during the war effort is a major part of his life, it is not the work that earned him international acclaim. While still conducting nuclear tests at Los Alamos, Reines and colleague Clyde Cowan set out to prove the existence of a theoretical particle called the neutrino.
The neutrino was theorized in 1930 as a necessary particle to account for the calculations of missing energy in beta decay. Famed physicist Enrico Fermi gave it its name in 1934. In essence, the neutrino is a subatomic particle that is electrically neutral with a mass so imperceptible that it was long considered to be zero. The scientific relevance of the neutrino is largely due to its weak interactions with other particles. This means neutrinos can be used to probe environments that light and radio waves cannot penetrate. This is particularly useful for probing astrophysical sources deep in the solar system.
While the scientific implications are complicated to the layperson, the mere existence of the neutrino still had to be proved. Reines and Cowan conducted their first neutrino experiment in 1953 dubbed “Project Poltergeist.” Reines and Cowan spent the previous two years building a detector that would register the gamma ray reaction when a neutrino combines with a proton to create a neutron and a positron. They used a liquid scintillator with cadmium salt to measure the miniscule reaction.
They first tried detecting a reaction at the Hanford nuclear site in Washington State, but it was unsuccessful. On June 14, 1956 at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina, history was made with successful detection.
"This truly is a remarkable achievement. At that time, neutrinos were still poorly understood theoretically, and technically, the experiment conducted by Frederick Reines and Clyde Cowan to detect neutrinos was extremely difficult due to the elusive nature of neutrinos and the major technical challenges involved in detecting weakly interacting particles," said Yu. "They overcame various obstacles by developing new experimental techniques and designing new detectors. Their work made a lasting impact to later neutrino theories and experiments."
Reines spent much of the remainder of his life studying neutrino interactions. At the age of 77 in 1995, Reines officially was honored with the Nobel Prize in Physics for his discovery of the neutrino. He died in 1998 and the physics and astronomy department at the University of California-Irvine is named Frederick Reines Hall in his honor.