Samuel C. C. Ting

Samuel C. C. Ting is a Taiwanese-American particle physicist who discovered a previously unknown, unexpectedly heavy subatomic particle in 1974 while leading an experiment at the Brookhaven National Laboratory. Ting's team observed a sharp, unpredicted spike in the data indicating a new particle far heavier than any known meson, which he named the J particle; at nearly the same time, physicist Burton Richter at Stanford independently produced the same particle by a different method and called it the psi particle, so it became known jointly as the J/psi particle. The discovery provided the first direct experimental evidence for the existence of a fourth type of quark, called the charm quark, which had been theoretically predicted but not yet observed, and the finding was significant enough to be announced within days by both research groups in what became known as the November Revolution in particle physics. Ting and Richter shared the 1976 Nobel Prize in Physics for this discovery. Ting, a longtime professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, later led the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer experiment, a large particle physics detector installed on the International Space Station to search for antimatter and dark matter in cosmic rays, a multinational collaboration he has directed for decades.