Richard E. Taylor
1929–2018, Medicine Hat, Alberta, Canada, Stanford, California, USA
Canadian-born American physicist who shared the 1990 Nobel Prize in Physics for the SLAC deep inelastic scattering experiments that revealed quarks.
Born in Medicine Hat, Alberta, Taylor studied at the University of Alberta before earning his PhD at Stanford in 1962. He joined the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, where he designed the experimental equipment — beam optics, targets and the spectrometers in End Station A — for the electron scattering program. From 1982 to 1986 he directed the SLAC research division. He remained at Stanford for his entire career, becoming emeritus in 2003.
Nobel-winning work
Taylor was the principal architect of the SLAC scattering apparatus. For the 1967–1973 deep inelastic runs he designed the 8 GeV and 20 GeV spectrometers in End Station A and the precision beam diagnostics that made absolute cross-section measurements possible at large scattering angles.
Those measurements of the proton (and neutron, via deuterium) structure functions exhibited Bjorken scaling and the pattern expected for spin-½ partons — the experimental proof that quarks are real.
Workplaces: Stanford University, SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory
Canada, United States