The Search for Charm, Beauty, and Truth at High Energies (Polymer Science and Technology Series)
(The search for flavored particles is one of the most;inte...)
The search for flavored particles is one of the most;interesting topics in high energy physics. Many experimental groups are working on this subject, but the solution to many of the problems are still open. Therefore it seemed very useful that people interested in these problems can probe then in a discussion. This is the aim of this Europhysics Study Conference, which has been organized both as a conference and a workshop. The present experimental knowledge on branching ratios, life times, cross sections and production mechanisms of flavored parti cles has been presented in general talks and discussed in the morn ing sessions, as well as the bases of the theoretical ideas and pre dictions. The experimental methods: visual detectors, live targets, high resolution vertex detectors, special triggers of search on fla vored particles, have been treated in the afternoon panels. These proceedings contain the talks and panel discussions with the exception of a few small contributions to the panels and talks by C. Baltay ("Search for charm and new flavors with bubble cham bers"), G. Alteralle ("Lifetime of charm and new flavors"), P. Monacelli ("Results on charm production from a CERN Beam Dump exper iment"), A. Capone ("Experimental study of same-sign dimunon events produced in neutrino and anti-neutrino beams").
Samuel C. C. Ting is an American physicist. He is known mostly for the discovering of the subatomic J/ψ particle.
Background
Samuel Chao Chung Ting was born on January 27, 1936 in Ann Arbor, Michigan, United States. He is the son of Professor Kuan Hai Ting and Professor Tsun-Ying Wang. His father was studying engineering at the University of Michigan. He completed his studies when Ting was two months old, and the family returned to mainland China, where his father became an engineering professor. His mother was a psychology professor. As a child, Ting was cared for mostly by his maternal grandmother while both his parents worked.
Education
Although Ting's grandmother emphasized the strong value of education, Ting was not able to begin school until he was twelve years old, because World War II intervened. After the war, the family moved to Taiwan, where Ting’s father taught at the National Taiwan University.
In 1956, Ting enrolled at the University of Michigan, studying both mathematics and physics, and in 1959 he earned bachelor’s degrees in both subjects.
Ting received his doctor's degree in physics in 1962.
Ting went to the European Center for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva as a Ford Foundation fellow in 1963. He worked with Giuseppe Cocconi on the proton synchrotron, a device that accelerates protons (the nucleus of an atom) for analysis and measurement.
In 1965 Ting joined the faculty of Columbia University, where he worked with Tsung-dao Lee and Chien-Shiung Wu.
Ting became interested in the production of electron (negatively charged particles of an atom) and positron (positively charged particles of an atom) pairs by photon radiation after experiments conducted at Harvard raised questions regarding some of the predictions of quantum electrodynamic theory (the theory that deals with the interaction of matter with electromagnetic radiation). He took a leave of absence from Columbia and went to Hamburg, Germany, in 1966 to repeat the Harvard experiments at the German synchrotron facility. There his team built a double-arm spectrometer (an instrument used to analyze and measure particle emissions), which enabled them to measure the momentum of two particles simultaneously. It also recorded the angles of their deflection from the radiation beam. The researchers were able to calculate the masses of the particles and their combined energy, making identification of the particles easier and clarifying their interrelationships. Results of these experiments confirmed the accuracy of the quantum electrodynamic description of pair production.
Ting’s work at Hamburg led him to ponder the nature of heavy photons (particles of radiation). After his return from Germany, he moved to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he became full professor in 1969. In 1971, while still at MIT, Ting began a project to determine the properties of heavy photons at Brookhaven National Laboratory in Long Island, New York. Rather than the usual method of bombarding a beryllium target with photon beams, he used a proton beam of ten trillion protons per second in hopes of creating a heavy particle that would decay into pairs of electrons and positrons.
Because the search for heavy particles requires such high energy levels, Ting's MIT team redesigned the double-arm spectrometer to detect electron-positron pairs between 1.5 and 5.5 giga-electron volts (a giga equals one billion). The spectrometer also had to be capable of adding precise but small amounts of energy incrementally, as well as detecting their effects on the particle pairs. After several months of searching, the Ting team was rewarded in August, 1974 by the appearance of a sharp spike of high-energy electron-positron pairs at 3.1 billion electron volts. This was unexpected. Ting checked his measurements carefully and decided he was looking at evidence of a new particle that had not been predicted, the J/psi particle. It was heavier than known similar particles; it also occupied a very narrow range of energy states, and it lasted a relatively long time.
Ting reported his results to the Frascati Laboratory in Italy, where physicists were able to confirm his observations in only two days. Ting’s paper and the results of the Frascati experiment were accepted for publication in Physical Review Letters. Just a few days after Ting discussed the paper with the review’s editor, he attended a routine scheduling meeting at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center; here he shared his results with Stanford’s Burton Richter. Amazingly, Richter had made the same discovery at virtually the same time by creating collisions between positrons and electrons in an accelerator.
The two-year period between discovery and Nobel Prize (1976) was probably the shortest interval on record and caused considerable comment at the time, because some scientists feared the discovery would not stand the test of time. However, it has since been the basis for a virtual explosion in the detection of many other fundamental particles.
The J/psi particle’s lifespan was a thousand times longer than expected for such a heavy particle (three times heavier than a proton). It was believed that most subatomic particles were made up of combinations of even more fundamental particles called quarks, of which only three types were thought to exist before the discovery of the J/psi particle. The peculiarities of the J/psi particle (especially its long life) suggested the existence of a fourth type of quark, called charm. The J/psi particle was interpreted to be composed of a charmed quark and an antiquark, creating a property called “charmonium.”
Charm had been predicted in 1970 and its addition to the family of quarks was thought to unify the electromagnetic and weak forces, further encouraging physicists to believe in the possibility of a grand unifying theory in which the fundamental forces of nature would be shown to be equivalent at very high energies.
Ting is the principal investigator for the international $1.5 billion Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer experiment. It was installed on the International Space Station on 19 May 2011.
Ting and Richter shared the 1976 Nobel Prize for physics for the discovery of the J/ψ meson nuclear particle.
In addition to the Nobel Prize, Ting received the 1976 E.O. Lawrence Award.
He won Eringen Medal in 1977, as well as De Gasperi Award 11 years later.
Ting is a member of American, Italian and European Physical Societies, as well as Academia Sinica, Pakistani Academy of Science, Academy of Science of USSR.
Connections
Ting married Kay Louise Kuhne in 1960, and together they had two daughters - Jeanne Ting Chowning and Amy Ting. After the divorce he married Susan Carol Marks in 1985. They had one son, Christopher.
