Samuel C.C. Ting
Facts
Photo from the Nobel Foundation archive.
Samuel Chao Chung Ting
The Nobel Prize in Physics 1976
Born: 27 January 1936, Ann Arbor, MI, USA
Affiliation at the time of the award: Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, MA, USA
Prize motivation: “for their pioneering work in the discovery of a heavy elementary particle of a new kind”
Prize share: 1/2
Work
By about 1970, a large number of elementary particles had been identified. Most of these comprised two or three quarks. Using high-energy particle collisions and independently of one another, in 1974 both Samuel Ting and Burton Richter, independently of each other, discovered a new heavy particle, known as J/psi, proving experimentally the existence of a fourth quark, later named “charm”.
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