Henry Way Kendall

Henry Way Kendall was an American experimental physicist who shared the 1990 Nobel Prize in Physics for experiments showing that protons and neutrons contain quarks.

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Jerome Friedman: American experimental physicist who shared the 1990 Nobel Prize in Physics for deep inelastic electron scattering experiments. Friedman led the MIT team whose experiments Kendall helped conduct and interpret.
Deep inelastic scattering: A high-energy collision process in which a lepton probes a hadron and breaks it into lower-energy particles. Kendall’s Nobel-winning experiments measured this process to reveal pointlike constituents inside nucleons.
Quark: An elementary fermion that combines with other quarks to form hadrons such as protons and neutrons. Quarks are the constituents whose presence Kendall’s experiments helped establish.
Quark model: A classification scheme that organizes hadrons as combinations of quarks. Scattering supplied direct experimental support for the model’s proposed constituents.
Richard Taylor: Canadian-American physicist who shared the 1990 Nobel Prize in Physics for experiments revealing quark structure in nucleons. Taylor directed the SLAC team in the collaboration that established the discovery.
Electron scattering: The deflection of electrons by a target, used to infer the target’s structure and properties. The Stanford experiments were a high-energy application of this broader probing method.
Proton: A positively charged hadron in atomic nuclei, composed of two up quarks and one down quark. The proton was one of the nucleons probed in the Stanford scattering experiments.
Nucleon: Either of the two baryons, proton or neutron, that make up most atomic nuclei. Kendall’s experiments established internal structure in both members of this particle family.
Massachusetts Institute of Technology: A private research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, founded in 1861. Kendall was an MIT professor and carried out the Nobel-winning experiments there.
SLAC-MIT experiment: A series of 1960s electron-scattering experiments at SLAC that found pointlike constituents inside protons and neutrons. Kendall worked on the experiment that produced the decisive evidence for quarks.