Lee Grodzins
professor
Physics
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Poland
Biography
"After graduating as an engineer from the University of New Hampshire in 1946, Lee was hired to work as an assistant in a nascent nuclear physics group at General Electric's Research Laboratory in Schenectady. Those memorable two years led to graduate school in physics at Purdue University. In 1955, Lee Grodzins took a postdoc position in Maurice Goldhaber's nuclear physics group at Brookhaven National Laboratory. Lee so wanted to work with Maurice that he took a year-long instructorship at Purdue while waiting for an opening. Maurice gave him the timely problem of determining the properties of the beta-decay products of the radioactive isotope Eu-152. In 1957, near the end of those studies, Lee measured the femtosecond lifetime of one of the daughter states in Sm-152 that is fed by K-electron capture. The technique, still novel, used the neutrino's momentum to produce resonant fluorescence in solid samarium. Its success was the basis for Goldhaber's idea for determining the helicity of the neutrino's spin in a table-top experiment that took but a few weeks. A postdoc experiment, motivated by curiosity and the promise of fun, was the foundation of an experiment of singular significance."
Research Interest
Relativistic Heavy Ion Physics
