Which physicist won the 1995 Nobel Prize in Physics for detecting the neutrino?

Frederick Reines won the 1995 Nobel Prize in Physics for detecting the neutrino. He and Clyde Cowan made the first successful direct detection of neutrinos in 1956 using a detector near a nuclear reactor.

Neutrinos are electrically neutral particles that interact extremely weakly with matter, making them difficult to observe. Reines and Cowan used the inverse beta-decay reaction, in which an antineutrino interacting with a proton produces a positron and a neutron. Their detector looked for the characteristic sequence of signals from those products.

The experiment confirmed that neutrinos predicted by particle physics were real and could be detected. Cowan had died in 1974, so he could not share the Nobel Prize; Nobel rules do not allow prizes to be awarded posthumously.

Reines shared the 1995 Physics Nobel with Martin Perl, who discovered the tau lepton. Raymond Davis Jr. and Masatoshi Koshiba later shared the 2002 Physics Nobel for detecting cosmic neutrinos and developing neutrino astronomy.