He was a recipient of the 1988 Nobel Prize in Physics, along with Leon M. Lederman and Melvin Schwartz, for the discovery of the muon neutrino.

[7] The rise of Nazism in Germany, with its open anti-Semitism, prompted his parents, Ludwig Lazarus (a cantor and religious teacher) and Berta May Steinberger,[8][9] to send him out of the country.

[7] Steinberger emigrated to the United States at the age of 13, making the trans-Atlantic trip with his brother Herbert.

In 1949 he published a calculation of the lifetime of the neutral pion,[13] which anticipated the study of anomalies in quantum field theory.

[14] Following Princeton, in 1949, Steinberger went to the Radiation Lab at the University of California at Berkeley, where he performed an experiment which demonstrated the production of neutral pions and their decay to photon pairs.

[15] Despite this and other achievements, he was asked to leave the Radiation Lab at Berkeley in 1950, due to his refusal to sign the so-called non-Communist Oath.

[19] During 1954–1955, Steinberger contributed to the development of the bubble chamber with the construction of a 15 cm device for use with the Cosmotron at Brookhaven National Laboratory.

The experiment used a pion beam to produce pairs of hadrons with strange quarks to elucidate the puzzling production and decay properties of these particles.

Steinberger and his collaborators contributed several such measurements using large (75 cm) liquid-hydrogen bubble chambers and separated hadron beams at Brookhaven.

Leon Lederman, Steinberger and Schwartz built large spark chambers at Nevis Labs and exposed them in 1961 to neutrinos produced in association with muons in the decays of charged pions and kaons.

They used the Alternating Gradient Synchrotron (AGS) at Brookhaven, and obtained a number of convincing events in which muons were produced, but no electrons.

[27][28][independent source needed] Back in the United States, Steinberger conducted an experiment at Brookhaven to observe CP violation in the semi-leptonic decays of neutral kaons.

[29] This experiment also allowed the deduction of the phase of epsilon, and confirmed that CPT is a good symmetry of nature.

[31] He constructed an experiment there utilizing multi-wire proportional chambers (MWPC), recently invented by Georges Charpak.

[38] He shared the prize with Leon M. Lederman and Melvin Schwartz; at the time of the research, all three experimenters were at Columbia University.

[39] The experiment used charged pion beams generated with the Alternating Gradient Synchrotron at Brookhaven National Laboratory.

[25] He gave his Nobel medal to New Trier High School in Winnetka, Illinois (USA), of which he was an alumnus.

[41] Steinberger's first marriage to Joan Beauregard ended in a divorce, after which he married his former student, biologist Cynthia Alff.