Ting, Samuel Chao Chung

Ting, Samuel Chao Chung (1936–  ) physicist; born in Ann Arbor, Mich. He was raised in China and Taiwan, coming to the U.S.A. to study at the University of Michigan (1956–62). He performed nuclear research in Geneva (1963–64), then taught at Columbia University (1964–69). While on leave from Columbia, he went to Hamburg, where he began his pioneering studies of subatomic particles. Returning to the U.S.A., he joined the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1967), where, in 1974, he discovered the long-lived particle, "J," later proved identical to independent discoverer Burton Richter's psi particle. Ting and Richter shared the 1976 Nobel Prize in physics for their codiscovery of the particle they agreed to term "J/psi."

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Ting, Samuel Chao Chung 

Born Jan. 27, 1936, in Ann Arbor, Mich. American physicist.

Ting graduated from the University of Michigan in 1959 and received his Ph.D. from the university in 1962. In 1963 he held a fellowship at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva. He joined the teaching staff of Columbia University in 1964 and moved on to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1967; he became a professor at MIT in 1969.

Ting’s principal works deal with particle physics. In 1974, while studyilng the production of electron-positron pairs in the interaction of a beryllium target with the beam of the Brookhaven proton accelerator, he discovered the J-meson (ψ-meson), the first particle of a new family of mesons with a fourth (charmed) quark.

For his discovery of the J-meson, Ting received a Nobel Prize in 1976.