Samuel Chao Chung Ting
Ting, Samuel Chao Chung (1936-) is an American experimental physicist who was awarded the 1976 Nobel Prize in physics for his discovery of a new kind of subatomic particle, the J/psi particle. He shared this honor with fellow American physicist Burton Richter, who independently discovered the same particle almost simultaneously.
Ting, also known as Ding Zhaozhong, was the first of three children born to Kuan Hai Ting, a professor of engineering, and Tsun-Ying Wang, a psychology professor, while they were visiting in Ann Arbor, Michigan, making Ting an American citizen. When he was just two months old, the family returned to mainland China, and he grew up primarily under the care of his maternal grandmother, who home-schooled him while both of his parents worked. Because of wartime conditions caused by the Chinese-Japanese War (1937–1945) and World War II (1939–1945), Ting did not receive any formal education until he was 12. In the interim, however, he benefitted from the frequent company of his parents' university friends, which, he has noted, later influenced his decision to work in an academic setting.
In 1956, Ting came to the United States to study at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, the city of his birth. Arriving in the United States barely able to speak English and with $100 to his name, he lived initially with the family of the dean of the school of engineering, a friend of his parents, and relied on scholarships to complete his education. After only three years of undergraduate studies, he had managed to earn two bachelor's degrees, in mathematics and physics, and in 1962 completed his doctorate in physics at Michigan as well. In 1960, while still a graduate student, he married his first wife, architect Kay Louise Kuhn, with whom he had two daughters.
In 1963, a Ford Foundation fellowship allowed Ting to travel to Geneva, Switzerland, to do research at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), the world's largest center for the study of subatomic particles. There, he met Italian physicist Giuseppe Cocconi, with whom he worked closely on the proton synchrotron. In 1965, he returned to the United States to work alongside some of the most eminent physicists of the day as part of the physics faculty at New York's Columbia University.
In 1966, however, Ting was prompted to return once again to Europe to begin the research that ultimately resulted in his Nobel Prize. Since 1967, he has been a member of the physics faculty at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, being named MITs first Thomas Dudley Cabot Institute Professor in 1977. In 1985, Ting was married for a second time, to Susan Carol Marks, with whom he had his third child, Christopher.
The impetus that led to Ting's Nobel-winning discovery originated in a Harvard research project. That experiment, done at the Cambridge electron accelerator, involved the production of electron-positron pairs—atomic particles that are identical except that positrons have a positive charge and electrons have a negative charge.
The Harvard findings appeared to violate some of the theoretical principles of quantum electrodynamics, the study of the ways in which electromagnetic radiation interacts with matter, and, after studying the research closely, Ting resolved to duplicate this “pair production” experiment himself. Taking a leave of absence from Columbia in 1966, he went to Hamburg, Germany, to repeat the experiment at the Deutsches Elektronen Synchotron (DESY).
In order to conduct his experiment, Ting and his DESY research group built a special spectrometer, an instrument to measure and analyze particle emissions. Theirs was a specially built “double-arm” spectrometer capable, among other things, of measuring the momentum of two separate particles at the same time. By determining the masses and combined energy of these particles, Ting was able to identify them more easily and determine their effects upon each other. Ultimately, his research showed that the quantum electrodynamic description of pair production was correct to distances as small as 100-trillionth of a centimeter.
After returning to the United States and joining MIT, he began an experimental program at the Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island to search for particles.
There Ting found what he was looking for and more. At Brookhaven he and his colleagues built another double-arm synchrotron, making numerous highly sophisticated design improvements over his German model and impressing his entire scientific community when, virtually from the start, it worked exactly as it was supposed to.
In August 1974, Ting and his team of researchers delected evidence of what appeared to be an unknown heavy particle. After checking his measurements, Ting was convinced that he had indeed discovered a previously undetected subatomic particle, which he named the J particle. But, wanting to be certain of what he had actually found, he did not immediately make a public announcement. Instead, he relayed his findings to Italy's Frascati Laboratory, and within two days, scientists there had confirmed his discovery.
Shortly thereafter, at a meeting at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC), Ting learned that a physicist there, Burton Richter, had found similar evidence of a new particle. When Ting and Richter compared data, they found that the particle Richter had named psi and Ting's J particle were one and the same. Working at opposite ends of the country the two physicists had made the same discovery at virtually the same time. The particle is now most commonly known as the J/psi particle.
The heavy J/psi particle had many peculiar characteristics, including a lifespan much longer than expected of heavy particles, which seemed to confirm the existence of a fourth type of quark, the charm. Quarks are fundamental particles from which scientists believe all matter is made. Since then, two other types have been discovered. Physicists are almost certain that there are no more quarks to discover.
Ting's original work at Hamburg has led him on a lifelong quest to understand the physics of electron or muon pairs, to discover new particles that decay into such pairs, and to further elucidate the principles of quantum electrodynamics. Today he leads a group of physicists at CERN in the hunt for cosmic “antimatter,” the theoretical “other half of the universe—the half that doesn't seem to be there at all. Although the laws of quantum physics dictate that every particle has a “twin” particle with the same properties but an opposite electric charge, this antimatter has never been found on Earth, nor even anywhere in the Milky Way galaxy. Thus, Ting and a team of physicists developed a new high-energy particle detector, the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS), which was launched on board the Space Shuttle in 1998 to look for antimatter. In the future, it will be installed at the International Space Station above Earth.
As well as being a recipient of the Nobel Prize, Ting won the Ernest Orlando Lawrence Memorial Award from the U.S. Energy Research and Development Agency in 1976; the Society of Engineering Science's Eringen Medal in 1977; and the DeGasperi Award in Science in 1988 from the Italian government. In 1988, he also received the Golden Leopard Award for Excellence from the town of Taormina, Italy, and the Gold Medal for Science from the city of Brescia, Italy. He served as coeditor of The Search for Charm, Beauty, and Truth at High Energies (1984, with Gianpolo Bellini).