Samuel C. C. Ting

Samuel C. C. Ting is an American experimental physicist who shared the 1976 Nobel Prize in Physics for discovering the J/ψ particle.

Burton Richter: An American physicist who shared the 1976 Nobel Prize in Physics for discovering the J/ψ particle. Richter led the independent SLAC experiment that found the same particle as Ting’s team.
J/ψ meson: A meson containing a charm quark and charm antiquark, discovered in 1974. This is the particle whose discovery brought Ting the Nobel Prize.
Ann Arbor: A city in Michigan that is home to the University of Michigan. Ting studied physics at the University of Michigan after moving to the United States.
November Revolution: The upheaval in particle physics triggered by the 1974 discoveries of the J/ψ and charm quark. Ting’s discovery was one half of the finding that confirmed a new heavy quark.
Leon M. Lederman: An American experimental physicist who shared the 1988 Nobel Prize in Physics for work on neutrinos. Lederman’s team later discovered the bottom quark, extending the heavy-quark research Ting helped establish.
Charm quark: A second-generation quark with electric charge +2/3 and a mass far greater than that of up and down quarks. The J/ψ contains charm and anticharm, providing striking evidence for the new quark.
University of Michigan: A public research university in Ann Arbor, Michigan, founded in 1817. Ting earned his undergraduate and doctoral degrees there.
Quark model: A framework describing hadrons as particles composed of quarks and antiquarks. The J/ψ discovery strongly supported the model’s prediction of a fourth quark flavor.
James Bjorken: An American theoretical physicist known for contributions to particle physics, including scaling in deep inelastic scattering. Bjorken’s scaling ideas helped motivate the high-energy experiments in which Ting built his career.
Proton synchrotron: A circular accelerator that raises proton energy by synchronizing radio-frequency fields with their motion. Ting’s Brookhaven experiment used an accelerator to collide energetic protons with a fixed target.

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