YEREVAN, OCTOBER 4, ARMENPRESS. Leon Lederman, the U.S. physicist who won the Nobel Prize for co-discovering one of the universe’s subatomic building blocks before coining the term “God particle” to describe the mechanism that gives mass to matter, has died. He was 96, Bloomberg reports.

He died Wednesday in Rexburg, Idaho, according to the website of the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Illinois, where he had once served as director.

Lederman shared the 1988 Nobel Prize in physics with Melvin Schwartz and Jack Steinberger for detecting the muon neutrino, a previously unknown member of the lepton family of particles. At Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island, New York, they used a high-energy accelerator to produce a beam of neutrinos, which can create muons and electrons on interaction with matter.