Frederick Reines

Frederick Reines married Sylvia Samuels on August 30, 1940. They had two children, Robert and Alisa.

He suffered from ill health during the final years of his life and died on August 26, 1998, at the age of 80.

Frederick Reines was born on March 16, 1918, in Paterson, New Jersey, to Gussie (Cohen) and Israel Reines, Jewish emigrants from the same town in Russia. He had three elder siblings.

All his elder siblings were good students who were very serious about their studies. They motivated the young boy to do well in school. Ironically, while he excelled in literary and history courses during his high school years, he did not fare well in mathematics or science.

It was only during his final year at Union Hill High School that he developed a keen interest in science subjects and decided to be a physicist. He was also a talented singer who retained his love for music throughout his life. He graduated in 1935.

Reines initially planned to attend the Massachusetts Institute of Technology but eventually made up his mind to attend Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, New Jersey. He earned his Bachelor of Science (B.S.) degree in mechanical engineering in 1939, and his Master of Science (M.S.) degree in mathematical physics in 1941. His master’s thesis was titled ‘A Critical Review of Optical Diffraction Theory.’

He then went to New York University where he began his doctoral research. He earned his Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) in 1944 with a thesis he wrote under the supervision of Richard D. Present on ‘Nuclear fission and the liquid drop model of the nucleus.’

Even before Frederick Reines completed his thesis in 1944, he was offered a position as a staff member under Richard Feynman in the Theoretical Division at the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory where he was assigned to work on the Manhattan Project.

His time at the laboratory was highly productive and he received the chance to work with some truly brilliant minds. Soon he was made a Group Leader in the Theoretical Division and was given the responsibility of overseeing experiments designed for the testing of nuclear weapons in the Marshall Islands in 1951. In 1958, he was a delegate to the Atoms for Peace conference in Geneva.

In the 1950s, he formed a productive collaboration with Clyde L. Cowan and the two men performed the Cowan–Reines neutrino experiment through which the existence of the antineutrino—a neutrally charged subatomic particle with very low mass—was confirmed.

Starting from the mid-1950s, Reines focused most of his efforts on the study of the neutrino’s properties and interactions. His neutrino research opened up newer job avenues for him and he was made the head of the physics department of Case Western Reserve University from 1959 to 1966.

There he continued his neutrino research and led a group that was the first to detect neutrinos created in the atmosphere by cosmic rays. In 1966, he was appointed the first dean of physical sciences at the new University of California, Irvine (UCI). There he motivated some of his graduate students to work towards the development of medical radiation detectors. He retired from UCI in 1988 but he continued teaching until 1991, and remained on UCI's faculty for the rest of his life.

Frederick Reines achieved international fame for his co-detection of the neutrino with Clyde Cowan in the neutrino experiment. He dedicated the major part of his career to the study of the neutrino's properties and interactions, and his works helped to lay the foundation for the further development of neutrino research in the decades to come.