Aihud Pevsner (December 18, 1925 – June 17, 2018) was an American experimental physicist who was the lead researcher credited with the discovery of the

Eta meson The eta () and eta prime meson () are isosinglet mesons made of a mixture of up, down and strange quarks and their antiquarks. The charmed eta meson () and bottom eta meson () are similar forms of quarkonium; they have the same spin and pari ...

. Born in

Haifa Haifa ( he, חֵיפָה ' ; ar, حَيْفَا ') is the third-largest city in Israel—after Jerusalem and Tel Aviv—with a population of in . The city of Haifa forms part of the Haifa metropolitan area, the third-most populous metropoli ...

Mandatory Palestine Mandatory Palestine ( ar, فلسطين الانتدابية '; he, פָּלֶשְׂתִּינָה (א״י) ', where "E.Y." indicates ''’Eretz Yiśrā’ēl'', the Land of Israel) was a geopolitical entity established between 1920 and 1948 i ...

, to Yoshua Pevsner and Esther Ben-Yeshaia, Aihud Pevsner immigrated to the United States with his parents at the age of three. The family, of Belarusian-Jewish descent, settled in New York. Pevsner served in the United States Navy from 1944 to 1945, and married Lucille Wolf in 1949. Upon earning a doctorate in physics from

Columbia University Columbia University (also known as Columbia, and officially as Columbia University in the City of New York) is a private research university in New York City. Established in 1754 as King's College on the grounds of Trinity Church in Manha ...

, he began teaching at the

Massachusetts Institute of Technology The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a Private university, private Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern t ...

. In 1956, Pevsner joined the

Johns Hopkins University Johns Hopkins University (Johns Hopkins, Hopkins, or JHU) is a private research university in Baltimore, Maryland. Founded in 1876, Johns Hopkins is the oldest research university in the United States and in the western hemisphere. It consiste ...

faculty. Over the course of his career, Pevsner received two

Guggenheim fellowships Guggenheim Fellowships are grants that have been awarded annually since by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation to those "who have demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the ar ...

, was named a

Fulbright Scholar The Fulbright Program, including the Fulbright–Hays Program, is one of several United States Cultural Exchange Programs with the goal of improving intercultural relations, cultural diplomacy, and intercultural competence between the people o ...

, and granted fellowship by the American Physical Society. He was the lead researcher credited with the discovery of the

, and appointed a Jacob L. Hain professor in 1977. Pevsner died at the age of 92 on June 17, 2018.

References

{{Israel-scientist-stub 1925 births 2018 deaths 20th-century American physicists 20th-century American Jews Scientists from Haifa American people of Belarusian-Jewish descent Experimental physicists Massachusetts Institute of Technology faculty Johns Hopkins University faculty Columbia Graduate School of Arts and Sciences alumni Fellows of the American Physical Society Mandatory Palestine emigrants to the United States 21st-century American Jews American people of Palestinian-Jewish descent