Born in Chicago, Steinberg received an S.B. degree from the University of Chicago in 1941. Subsequently, he was employed for two years as an analytical chemist with the War Department at the Elwood Ordnance Plant near Joliet, IL. In 1943 he joined the Metallurgical Laboratory at the University of Chicago. At the same time he continued graduate studies on a part-time basis. He received his Ph.D. in chemistry from the university in 1947; that year he joined Argonne National Laboratory, the successor to the Metallurgical Laboratory.

He has identified and characterized the chemical and nuclear properties of many fission products. He described the effect of the sample environment on the self-absorption and back-scattering of ß-particles. He showed how fission mass-yield distributions vary with incident neutron energy and the nature of the fissioning nucleus. Together with his associates B. D. Wilkins and R. R. Chasman, he developed a scission-point model of fission, which has been called the best static model of fission developed. It not only describes most observable fission phenomena but is useful for predictions as well as the interpretation of anomalies in the astrophysical r-process.

Steinberg’s work in high-energy nuclear chemistry is also outstanding. He and his collaborators discovered the onset of a new reaction mechanism in proton bombardments of heavy elements between 1 and 11.5 GeV that is characterized by a change in the distribution of the reaction products from forward peaking to sideward peaking in laboratory coordinates.

Awards

1987 Seaborg Award: Ellis P. Steinberg