Samuel Chao Chung Ting

Samuel Chao Chung Ting, born in 1936, American physicist and Nobel Prize winner. In 1976 Ting shared the Nobel Prize in physics with fellow American physicist Burton Richter for independently discovering the elementary particle J/psi.

Ting was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan, but spent most of his childhood in mainland China and Taiwan. After returning to the United States in 1956, Ting received his B.S. degree in mathematics and physics in 1959, his M.S. degree in 1960, and his Ph.D. degree in 1962, all from the University of Michigan. In 1963 he worked at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Switzerland. Two years later, he became assistant professor of physics at Columbia University. Ting did research in Hamburg, Germany, at the Deutches Elektronen-Synchrotron (DESY) facility in 1966. In 1967 he accepted a position at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and in 1969 became a full professor there. He currently continues his research at MIT.

Ting's research centers on high-energy particle physics, the area of physics that deals with the structure of elementary particles. One way physicists study these particles is by smashing particles together and looking at what comes out of the collision. That is accomplished with particle accelerators, devices designed to speed up charged particles to the desired velocity for the collision.

In 1971 Ting and a team of physicists began conducting particle research at the Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, New York. The group was searching for new particles, specifically relatively heavy particles with short lives. They used a proton accelerator that could hit a stationary target (Ting's group used beryllium as a target) with 10 trillion protons per second. Protons are heavier particles than the electrons and positrons used in some particle accelerators, and so are more likely to produce heavier particles in collisions.

In August of 1974 Ting's group discovered that collisions of a certain energy were producing a large number of electrons and positrons. Ting concluded that these particles were the result of the decay of an unknown, short-lived particle produced by collisions at that energy. He named this new particle J.

At a meeting at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) in California, Ting learned of Richter's discovery of the new particle that Richter called psi. The two physicists compared findings, concluded they had found the same particle, and combined the names to call the particle J/psi.

The discovery of the J/psi particle provided evidence for the existence of a fourth quark, called charm, which had been predicted but never proven to exist. Quarks are the building blocks of elementary particles, and physicists now believe there are six types of quarks.