Jack Steinberger

Jack Steinberger’s first marriage was to Joan Beauregard with whom he had two sons.

He is currently married to Cynthia Alff, his former student and biologist. The couple has one son and one daughter. He now lives in Geneva, Switzerland.

Hans Jakob "Jack" Steinberger was born on May 25, 1921, in Germany, to Berta and Ludwig Steinberger as one of their three sons. His childhood was a simple one as he grew up in the post-war era marked by economic depression.

Things became worse for the Jewish family with the rise of the Nazi party in 1933. The systematic persecution of the Jews followed quickly, and fearing for their children’s lives, his parents sent Jack and his elder brother to the United States in 1934.

Young Jack found a guardian in Barnett Farroll, the owner of a grain brokerage, who cared for him as a foster child. Farroll also helped Jack’s parents and younger brother move to the United States in 1938.

Despite all the challenges he faced, Jack grew up to be a good student. He studied chemical engineering at Armour Institute of Technology (now Illinois Institute of Technology) before moving to the University of Chicago from where he obtained a bachelor's degree in Chemistry in 1942.

After serving in the Signal Corps at MIT for a while, he returned to graduate studies at the University of Chicago in 1946, receiving his Ph.D. there in 1948. Then he attended the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton for a year.

As a student, Steinberger had done some work with Gian Carlo Wick on the scattering of polarized neutrons in magnetized iron. In 1949, Wick invited him to be his assistant at the Radiation Lab at the University of California at Berkeley.

There he encountered numerous opportunities to conduct experiments and performed the first experiments on the photoproduction of pions with A.S. Bishop. He also worked with the likes of W.K.H. Panofsky, J. Stellar, O. Chamberlain, R.F. Mozley and C. Weigand.

Despite his achievements at the university, he could stay there for just one year. He declined to sign the so-called Non-Communist Oath and was told to leave. He then joined Columbia University in the summer of 1950 as a member of the faculty.

The Nevis Laboratory at Columbia offered him the requisite tools for several important experiments and he explored the possibility of experimenting with beams of T mesons. In the ensuing years he collaborated with D. Bodansky, A.M. Sachs, and several PhD students to conduct experiments to determine the spins and parities of charged and neutral pions to study the scattering of charged pions.

Other important experiments conducted in the laboratory concerned the angular correlation between electron-positron pairs in neutral pion decays, and established the rare decay of a charged pion to an electron and neutrino.

Jack Steinberger, in collaboration with his colleagues Leon M. Lederman and Melvin Schwartz conducted experiments that established the existence of more than one type of neutrino. They became the first group to detect the interactions of the muon neutrino.