This from Sig Hecker then LANL Director (1996):
The Inside Story by Sig Hecker
Fred Reines Neutrino Day
Last Friday we celebrated the remarkable discovery of the neutrino by Fred Reines and Clyde Cowan 40 years ago while working for the Laboratory. The neutrino was exceedingly difficult to detect. Since it has little or no mass and no charge, one can only infer its existence through its interactions with matter, such as its reaction with protons to yield a neutron and a positron. However, the mean free path for reactions with hydrogen is approximately 1,000 light years of liquid hydrogen. This led Wolfgang Pauli, who postulated the existence of the neutrino in 1930 to ensure conservation of energy and momentum in nuclear beta decay, to say "I have done a terrible thing. I have postulated a particle that cannot be detected." Hans Bethe later added, "there is no practically possible way of observing the neutrino."
Fred joined the Manhattan Project in 1944 upon completion of his doctorate in physics from New York University. He worked in the Laboratory's Theoretical Division during and after the war, doing a stint as test director in the Pacific as well. In the early 1950s he asked Carson Mark, then T Division leader, for permission to work on the detection of the neutrino. Initially, Fred planned on using an atmospheric nuclear detonation as a neutrino source but decided instead to use reactors.
Fred, Clyde and their team built the sophisticated "Herr Auge" detector (on display in the main lobby of the Administration Building), which was 300 liters of liquid scintillator with 92 photomultiplier tubes surrounded by hundreds of tons of lead shielding. This new type of radiation detector was a spin-off from Wright Langham's work on radioactive tracer experiments to study the metabolism of tritium in the body. The neutrino team first saw a slight excess of neutrinos above background at a Hanford reactor and then confirmed it with an even larger detector at a more powerful Savannah River reactor. The Cowan, Reines, Harrison, Kruse and McGuire paper "Detection of the Free Neutrino: a Confirmation" in the July 1956 issue of Science proved to be the seminal paper that opened up a new field of research.
Fred Reines was here on Friday, accompanied by his wife, Sylvia, and his son, Robert. Betty Cowan Reed, widow of Clyde Cowan, was here with three of her children and many of her extended family members. We paid tribute to both Fred and Clyde. Their photos will join those of other Laboratory luminaries such as J. Robert Oppenheimer, Hans Bethe, Enrico Fermi, Norris Bradbury and Harold Agnew on the walls of the Study Center. A bronze bust of Fred, by artist Garth Tietjen, will join those of Fermi, Bethe, Edward Teller and Willy Zachariasen at the University House. UC President Richard Atkinson approved Fred's recognition as a Laboratory Senior Fellow Emeritus. All of this, of course, is in addition to the 1995 Nobel Prize for physics that Fred shared with Stanford Linear Accelerator Center physicist Martin Perl (for the discovery of the tau lepton).
One of the most impressive parts of last Friday's activities was a review of the progress made in neutrino physics over the past 40 years. The Reines Neutrino Symposium featured several current and former Laboratory researchers describing the Laboratory's contributions to the search for and understanding of neutrinos. Other invited speakers covered the current understanding of neutrinos in the grander scheme of astrophysics and cosmology. Los Alamos research includes theory and a variety of experiments that study neutrinos by tritium beta decay, neutrinos from the sun, and neutrinos produced at the LANSCE accelerator. Our researchers have continued to be at the leading edge of this exciting field of science.
The Reines and Cowan Nobel Prize-winning research on neutrinos was also a great demonstration of the synergy of mission-oriented and basic research. On Friday afternoon, this topic was the principal focus of a panel discussion chaired by John Browne. The panel included Martha Krebs, DOE assistant secretary and director of the Office of Energy Research; Gil Weigand, deputy assistant secretary for strategic computing simulation in the DOE Office of Defense Programs; Gerald Garvey, currently on assignment to the Office of Science and Technology Policy; David Campbell, chair of the physics department at the University of Illinois; and me.
There was agreement that the benefits of mission-oriented and basic research go both ways. Basic research provides the necessary underpinning for our government missions. Concurrently, the challenging technological problems associated with our missions provide the basis for fruitful problems for basic research. This synergy is especially strong at Los Alamos where the immense challenge of our defense missions has allowed us to establish in one place an impressive array of people and facilities, which, in turn, allows us to continue to make major contributions to solving fundamental problems in science. Our strong association with universities (University of California and other research universities) and our continuing compelling national missions have made this possible.
It was a great honor to recognize Fred's and Clyde's contributions to science and to the Laboratory. Both of them went on to university teaching and research careers in the late 1950s. I had the great pleasure of taking a physics course from Fred while he was physics department head at Case Institute of Technology in the early 1960s. In 1966, Fred moved on to the University of California at Irvine. From there he continued to serve the university in many ways. When I became director, Fred chaired the UC academic oversight committee for the Los Alamos and Livermore laboratories. In 1988, Fred officially retired from the university. He is now professor emeritus at UC, Irvine, and as of last Friday, Senior Fellow Emeritus at the Laboratory. Many thanks go to the symposium organizers Tom Bowles, Geoff West and Hywel White, as well as to Fran Talley, Bud Whaley and many others for helping to arrange a fascinating day. And to Fred Reines, many thanks for what you have done for us over the years.
Fred Reines and Clyde Cowan at the control center of the Hanford experiment (1953).
Now we honor the greatness of the bravery and sacrifice of hundreds of thousands of our countrymen.
When monsters on a mammoth scale menaced our world, these Americans sent those monsters to hell.
Thank God for them and God Bless Them.
