Ting, Samuel Chao Chung

Ting, Samuel Chao Chung,

1936–, American physicist, b. Ann Arbor, Mich., Ph.D. Univ. of Michigan 1962. Ting was a professor at Columbia from 1965 to 1969, when he joined the faculty at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He also does research at Brookhaven National Laboratory. Ting and Burton RichterRichter, Burton
, 1931–2018, American physicist, b. New York City, Ph.D. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1956. A professor at Stanford, Richter designed and built a particle accelerator (Stanford Positron-Electron Asymmetric Ring) with the help of David Ritson and
..... Click the link for more information.  were jointly awarded the 1976 Nobel Prize in Physics for their discovery in 1974 of a new kind of heavy elementary particle, which Ting called the J particle (now known as the J/psi mesonmeson
[Gr.,=middle (i.e., middleweight)], class of elementary particles whose masses are generally between those of the lepton class of lighter particles and those of the baryon class of heavier particles. From a technical point of view mesons are strongly interacting bosons; i.
..... Click the link for more information. ). Working independently, Ting at Brookhaven and Burton at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (now SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory), the two used different methods to make the finding at virtually the same time. The discovery led to the detection of many new subatomic particles. More recently, Ting proposed (1995) and has led the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer project, which developed a particle physics detector (AMS-02) that was added to the International Space Station in 2011. It searches for dark matter and antimatter and measures cosmic rays.

Ting, Samuel Chao Chung

 

Born Jan. 27, 1936, in Ann Arbor, Mich. American physicist.

Ting graduated from the University of Michigan in 1959 and received his Ph.D. from the university in 1962. In 1963 he held a fellowship at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva. He joined the teaching staff of Columbia University in 1964 and moved on to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1967; he became a professor at MIT in 1969.

Ting’s principal works deal with particle physics. In 1974, while studyilng the production of electron-positron pairs in the interaction of a beryllium target with the beam of the Brookhaven proton accelerator, he discovered the J-meson (ψ-meson), the first particle of a new family of mesons with a fourth (charmed) quark.

For his discovery of the J-meson, Ting received a Nobel Prize in 1976.

Ting, Samuel Chao Chung

(1936– ) physicist; born in Ann Arbor, Mich. He was raised in China and Taiwan, coming to the U.S.A. to study at the University of Michigan (1956–62). He performed nuclear research in Geneva (1963–64), then taught at Columbia University (1964–69). While on leave from Columbia, he went to Hamburg, where he began his pioneering studies of subatomic particles. Returning to the U.S.A., he joined the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1967), where, in 1974, he discovered the long-lived particle, "J," later proved identical to independent discoverer Burton Richter's psi particle. Ting and Richter shared the 1976 Nobel Prize in physics for their codiscovery of the particle they agreed to term "J/psi."