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Samuel TingPhysicist
Date of Birth: 27.01.1936
Country:  USA |
Content:
- Biography of Samuel Ting
- Career in Particle Physics
- Discovery of the J/psi Particle
- Later Work and Recognition
Biography of Samuel Ting
Early Life and EducationSamuel C.C. Ting, an American nuclear physicist, was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan. He was the eldest of three children of Ting Kuan-hai, a technology specialist working at the University of Michigan, and Wang Tsung-yin, a psychology professor. Two months after his birth, the family returned to mainland China, where Ting spent his early childhood. As a teenager, he lived in Taiwan, where his father taught at the National Taiwan University. Ting returned to the United States in 1956 with only a hundred dollars and limited knowledge of English, but with a desire to attend the University of Michigan. Supported by a scholarship, he achieved his goal and obtained a bachelor's degree in mathematics and physics in 1959, a master's degree in physics in 1960, and a doctorate in physics in 1962.
Career in Particle Physics
In 1963, Ting spent a year at CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research) in Geneva, Switzerland, working with Italian physicist Giuseppe Cocconi on a proton synchrotron. Two years later, he joined the faculty of Columbia University in New York and became interested in an recent experiment conducted at Harvard University involving the production of electron-positron pairs through the collision of a photon with a nuclear target. These experimental results seemed to contradict certain predictions of quantum electrodynamics, which describes the interaction of matter with electromagnetic radiation. Taking a leave of absence from Columbia University, Ting went to Hamburg, Germany, to replicate the Harvard experiment at the DESY accelerator (German Electron Synchrotron). Together with his team, Ting developed a two-beam spectrometer, which allowed simultaneous measurements of the momenta and angles of the particles involved in the collision. The spectrometer could also be tuned to register only particles with specific momenta, enabling the use of different effective masses. The experimental results obtained by Ting's group showed that the quantum electrodynamics description of pair production was valid down to distances as small as one femtometer.
Discovery of the J/psi Particle
Continuing his research on pair production and the search for new particles, Ting began teaching physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1967 and became a professor there two years later. In 1971, Ting and his group started searching for particles at the 30 billion electron-volt proton accelerator at the Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island, New York. They were looking for short-lived, relatively heavy particles that could only appear when a target was bombarded with high-energy particles. To detect such events, a highly sensitive detector was needed, capable of identifying the creation of an electron-positron pair with measurable energy in a billionth of a second among billions of other interactions occurring every second. Ting and his colleagues decided to create an original version of the two-beam spectrometer. After carefully adjusting each component, the complex apparatus worked almost perfectly from the first trial. This added a new dimension to Ting's reputation as a skillful and insightful experimenter. In August 1974, after several months of work, Ting's group discovered a sharp narrow peak associated with the production of an electron-positron pair at 3.1 billion electron volts. After further verification of this result, Ting concluded that they had discovered a new, previously unknown particle. It was twice as heavy as comparable particles and had a mass with a thousand times narrower range, indicating a small spread of energy states in which the particle could exist. Ting named the particle J/psi, following the convention of using capital Latin letters for stable particles of the modern group of physics and Greek letters for particles of the more classical group. The particle had lived thousands of times longer than could be explained by the assumption of only three fundamental particles, known as quarks, forming various combinations. This led physicists to suggest the presence of a fourth quark, called the charm quark, which had been predicted but lacked experimental confirmation. Ting's discovery was confirmed independently by physicists at the Frascati Laboratory in Italy, who had been informed by Ting himself. The work of Ting's group and the Frascati Laboratory appeared in the same November issue of Physical Review Letters.
Later Work and Recognition
Continuing his research with accelerators at CERN and DESY, Ting searches for new particles. He also maintains his teaching duties at MIT, where he became an Institute Professor in 1977. In 1960, Ting married Kay Louise Kühne, an architect, and they have two daughters. Known for his calm demeanor and meticulous approach to experimentation, Ting is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Sciences, the American Physical Society, the European Physical Society, and the Italian Physical Society. He received the Ernest Orlando Lawrence Memorial Award for Physics from the United States Department of Energy in 1976 and an honorary degree from the University of Michigan. Ting and his collaborator Burton Richter were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1976 for their pioneering work in the discovery of a new type of heavy elementary particle.
