Samuel Ting

Happy birthday Samuel Ting! He was born in 1936 in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where his parents met as graduate students. After living in China and Taiwan, Ting attended the same university as his parents, the University of Michigan, where he earned a PhD in particle physics. Ting went on to work at CERN and then Brookhaven National Lab. In 1974 his Brookhaven group (shown left) discovered the J/ψ meson, a 3.1-GeV/c2 particle, which turned out to be a bound state of the charm quark and its antiparticle. Its detection constituted the discovery of the fourth quark flavor, charm. For that experimental feat, Ting shared the 1976 Nobel physics prize with Burton Richter, who had discovered the same particle independently at SLAC. Ting’s current project is the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer. Installed since 2011 on the International Space Station, AMS aims to uncover the identity of dark matter by measuring the cosmic spectrum of positrons and other antimatter particles.

Date in History: 27 January 1936