Samuel Chao Chung Ting
active c. 1936, Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA
American experimental physicist who co-discovered the J/ψ particle at Brookhaven, confirming the charm quark, and later led major collider and space experiments.
Born in Ann Arbor to Chinese parents and raised partly in Taiwan, Ting earned his doctorate at Michigan and proved a meticulous experimentalist, first testing quantum electrodynamics with photon-photon collisions at DESY. His double-arm spectrometer at Brookhaven found the J particle in 1974, the same day Richter's SPEAR saw the ψ. He later led the L3 experiment at LEP and the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer on the International Space Station.
Nobel-winning work
Ting shared the 1976 Nobel Prize for discovering the J particle — the same object as Richter's ψ. At Brookhaven's AGS he had built a high-resolution double-arm spectrometer to hunt for heavy photons among proton-nucleus debris; instead it recorded a sharp peak of e⁺e⁻ pairs at 3.1 GeV.
The J/ψ's extraordinary narrowness, and the quick identification of its excitations, forced physicists to accept a fourth quark carrying the 'charm' quantum number predicted by Glashow. The two discoveries, announced together, unified the field around the quark-parton picture within months.
Workplaces: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, CERN
United States