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Samuel C. C. Ting
Nobel Laureate Physicist has Long, Strong Ties with the UM
by Lee Katterman
Office of the Vice President for Research
Samuel C. C. Ting's association with Ann Arbor goes back to his birth on January 27, 1936. Ting's parents, scholars in their own right, were both graduate students at the University of Michigan in early 1936. The couple planned to return soon to China with his pregnant wife. Chance intervened and the Ting's first child was born almost two months premature.
The Ting family did go back to Beijing, China when young Sam was two months old. His father became an engineering professor and his mother a professor of psychology. Ting's maternal grandmother assumed most of the child-rearing duties.
World War II prevented Sam Ting from beginning formal schooling until he was 9 years old, although education was always highly valued in his family. It turned out that Ting's maternal grandfather lost his life during the first Chinese Revolution. So, at the age of thirty-three, his grandmother had gone to school, became a teacher, and brought Sam's mother up alone.
"When I was young I often heard stories from my mother and grandmother recalling the difficult lives they had during that turbulent period and the efforts they made to provide my mother with a good education," says Ting. "Both of them were daring, original, and determined people, and they have left an indelible impression on me."
After World War II, his family moved to Taiwan, where he continued his education. In 1956, Ting decided to go to the United States for college. George Brown, the dean of the College of Engineering at the time, was a good friend of Sam Ting's parents, and Brown offered to let Sam live in the Brown home while he attended the University of Michigan.
"In China, I had read that many American students go through college on their own resources. I informed my parents that I would do likewise," says Ting. So on September 6, 1956, he arrived at the Detroit airport with $100 in his pocket (which at the time he thought would be more than adequate to get his educational plans in motion). Ting admits he was a bit frightened at his undertaking, as he didn't know anyone and communication in English was still difficult.
In 1959, after three years of study financed by scholarships, Ting earned a B.S. in engineering physics and engineering mathematics. He immediately began graduate work, also at the UM. In three more years, by 1962, Ting had received Master's and Ph.D. degrees as well.
Lawrence Jones, professor emeritus of physics, co-chaired Ting's thesis committee. "He was certainly academically talented," says Jones, "and he was a young man in a hurry." Ting had also considered doing his doctoral work under professor George Uhlenbeck, an eminent theoretical physicist on the UM faculty. "But the project Uhlenbeck proposed sounded like it would take longer to complete than Ting wanted to spend in school, so he instead chose to join an experimental project that I and Martin Perl [a UM professor at the time who won a Nobel Prize in Physics in 1995 after leaving the UM faculty] were conducting."
One of Ting's graduate school classmates at the UM was Homer Neal, UM President Emeritus and now a physicist active in the ATLAS experiment, a major research project situated at the CERN laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland. "We shared an office in the basement of Randall Laboratory," says Neal. "His desk was larger than mine. But I knew he was a generous guy when, as he was graduating a few years before me, he willed me his desk!"
Ting next went to the European Laboratory for Particle Physics (CERN) as a Ford Foundation postdoctoral scholar. At CERN, Ting worked with Giuseppe Cocconi on experiments utilizing the 28-billion-volt proton synchrotron.
In 1965, Ting joined the physics faculty at Columbia University where he became interested in the physics of electron-positron pair production. (A positron is an elementary particle like an electron, but with a positive electric charge.) Experiments on electron-positron pairs that had just been conducted at Harvard University caught Ting's attention, as they had appeared to bring into question some theoretical predictions about the interaction of matter and electromagnetic radiation.
This interest led Ting to Hamburg, Germany to conduct experiments at the Deutsches Electronen Synchrotron. Ting's research group built a new detector that ultimately helped to confirm that the theory and experimental results regarding electron-positron pairs were in harmony.
The construction of this detector was the first building block toward the Nobel Prize-winning work by Ting and his colleagues. Ting subsequently joined the faculty at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1967.
In the spring of 1972, he began an experimental program at the Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island, New York. Ting was searching for certain kinds of nuclear particles which would decay into electron-positron pairs. For this work, he modified the detector design used in Germany to make it still more sensitive to the specific energy signal for the electron-positron pairs, a signal that would be drowning in a flurry of millions of other nuclear collisions and particles. The Swedish Academy of Sciences, which awards the Nobel Prize, later compared the sensitivity of this detector to being able to "hear a cricket close to a jumbo jet taking off."
Over the ensuing 18 months, Ting's research team bombarded a beryllium target with a proton beam and took measurements with the new detector to look for the "signature" of electron-positron pairs. In August, 1974, the instrument produced surprising data. Ting immediately recognized this as something very different from theoretical expectations and spent the next few months checking and rechecking the experiment and data.
In the end, Ting concluded that the experiment provided evidence for a new elementary particle that was three times heavier than a proton and much longer-lived than any resonant state of elementary particles known up to that time (where "long life" is often measured in minute fractions of a second). By November, 1974, Ting finally announced his discovery of what he named the "J particle. This name is based on the symbol for electromagnetic current.
At about the time Ting was ready to publish his findings, he was at Stanford University for a routine meeting of scientists associated with the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center. At that meeting, he shared his experimental results with a colleague, Burton Richter. Amazingly, Richter told Ting of recent experiments which demonstrated the existence of a new particle which Richter had named the "psi particle." Both scientists quickly realized that they had discovered the same particle, although by completely different approaches.
The discovery was especially interesting to physicists, since the "J/psi particle" also seemed to confirm the existence of a fourth quark, "charm." Theoretical physicists had predicted such a fundamental particle, but it was Ting's and Richter's experiments which demonstrated its existence.
Less than two years later, Ting, at the young age of 40, and Richter, then age 45, shared the 1976 Nobel Prize in Physics, the shortest time span from a discovery to such recognition in Nobel history. The Nobel Prize solidified Ting's reputation as a daring, precise experimentalist who approached his work with great insight.
Ting at CERN Symposium in honor of the UM's Lawrence Jones, December, 1998.
The UM's Jones notes that Ting embodied three important qualities that go into most discoveries worthy of a Nobel Prize. "He has the talent and mental abilities to be creative; he put in a lot of hard work; and he had the good fortune, or luck, if you will, to be looking for the right thing at the right time," says Jones. "He has a strong personality and is a strong and effective group leader," also useful qualities in someone organizing the kind of "big science" experiments that elementary particle physics often requires.
Neal adds, "Ting is a deep thinker, and approaches every study with a high degree of analysis, care and dedication. He has provided both strong scientific and organizational leadership in some of the most extensive research undertakings of our time."
In 1978, the University of Michigan honored Samuel Ting by awarding him an honorary Doctor of Science degree.
Ting spends a good fraction of his time at CERN where his home is not far from the home Neal lives in when he is at CERN. Ting continues to lead two major experimental projects. At CERN, Ting heads the major L3 Experiment, an international collaboration involving over 500 physicists from about 33 universities and institutions which has been underway there since 1982, and which includes several UM faculty, staff, and graduate students.
Another current project is the development of an experiment to operate in the future International Space Station, beginning in about 2002. Ting's research team is constructing a three-ton detector, called the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS), which is designed to search for the existence of antimatter nuclei among primary cosmic rays.
This experiment can only be done in space where there is much less "background noise" from other particles to contend with, since antimatter, if it exists, will be extremely difficult to detect with reliability. Last June, a prototype AMS payload flew in the Space Shuttle Discovery to study its function and reliability.
The AMS may also help scientists understand one of the great mysteries of astrophysics -- the nature of "dark matter." The motion of galaxies and the expansion of the universe appear to astronomers to require more matter than can be observed; one theory of this "dark matter" is that it may be in the form of weakly-interacting elementary particles permeating the Universe. For some predictions of their characteristics, the AMS detector system might be sensitive to them.
Ting also maintains links to Michigan physics. Last fall, Ting organized a special symposium at CERN to honor Jones on the occasion of his retirement from the UM teaching faculty. Two of Ting's former graduate students, Jianming Qian and Bing Zhou, are now on the UM Physics Department faculty.
Jones and Neal both note that Ting is a loyal Michigan football fan. Ting recalls that in his six years attending the University, he missed quite a few classes, but he never missed a football game!
Finally, Neal recalls that during the time he served as chair of the physics department, "Ting was very helpful to us in areas ranging from assistance with faculty recruitment, the planning of major symposia, as well as program planning."
Samuel Ting with wife Susan and son Christopher at Michigan Stadium, Oct. 19, 1996.
- Other images of Samuel Ting
- Samuel C.C. Ting Autobiography from Nobel Lectures, World Scientific Publishing Co.
- Samuel C. C. Ting professional career, honors, awards.
May, 1999