Samuel C. C. Ting

In 1960, Samuel Ting married Kay Louise Kuhne. He has two daughters, Jeanne and Amy, from this union. The marriage later ended in a divorce.

In 1985, Ting married Dr. Susan Carol Marks. They have a son, Christopher.

Samuel Chao Chung Ting was born on January 27, 1936, in Ann Arbor, Michigan, United States. His father, Kuan-hai Ting, was a professor of engineering and his mother, Tsun-ying Jeanne Wang was a professor of psychology. He was the eldest of their three children.

Originally from Rizhao Country, Shandong province, China, his parents met and married as graduate students at the University of Michigan. They were settled in Rizhao but months before Samuel’s birth, they came to the United States on a short visit, hoping to get back to China before their son was born.

However, Samuel was born before time and since his parents were still at Michigan he became an American citizen by birth. Two months later, the family returned to China, where he was mostly raised by his maternal grandmother, who had singlehandedly raised his mother.

Very soon, China was invaded by Japan and the situation became so volatile that Samuel had to be educated at home. Later, as the Chinese Civil war set in, the situation turned worse and the family fled to Taiwan, where in 1948, Samuel was sent to a school for the first time.

After graduating from school, Samuel first entered National Cheng Kung University but after one year, decided to go to the United States of America for higher education. Accordingly, on 6 September 1956, he landed at Detroit with just $100 in hand.

In 1963, shortly after receiving his PhD, Samuel C. C. Ting received a Ford Foundation fellowship and with that he joined European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) at Geneva, Switzerland. There he worked with Giuseppe Cocconi at the Proton Synchrotron, a key component in CERN’s accelerator complex.

At the Synchrotron, protons from the Proton Synchrotron Booster or heavy ions from the Low Energy Ion Ring were accelerated. Working under Cocconi, he was able to get a more in-depth knowledge about the subject.

In the spring of 1965, he returned to the U.S.A and joined the Columbia University, New York as an instructor in Physics. Here he came in close contact with eminent scientists like L. Lederman, T.D. Lee, I.I. Rabi, M. Schwarts, J. Steinberger, C.S. Wu etc and greatly benefited from such associations.

In the following year, an experiment on electron-positron pair production by photon collision with a nuclear target was carried on at the Cambridge Electron Accelerator, Harvard University. It occurred to Ting that the result of the experiment violated the accepted theories of quantum electrodynamics. Therefore, he began studying it in detail.

Subsequently, he wrote to G. Weber and W. Jentschke of the Deutsches Elektronen Synchrotron (DESY), proposing to undertake a pair production experiment there. Once his proposal was accepted, he took leave from Columbia University and set out for Hamburg in March 1966.

Ting is best known for the discovery of ‘J’ particle. In August 1974, while working in the Brookhaven National Laboratory, Ting and his team members obtained an unusual reading, which diverged from the then-current atomic theory. He believed that it indicated presence of an unknown high mass particle.

He then sent the data to his colleague, Giorgio Bellettini, who was also director of Italy's Frascati Laboratory. He confirmed that Ting had discovered a new elementary particle, which was three times heavier than a proton and had a narrow range of energy states, a longer life span than anything known in physics.

In November, they jointly presented their findings in Physical Review Letters. Since the work involved electromagnetic currents bearing the symbol ‘j’, they called it ‘j-particle’. Soon after this, they were notified that Stanford University physicist Burton Richter had also proved the existence of a new particle; but he had named it the ‘psi particle’.

Subsequently, Ting and Richter compared their results and realized that they had independently discovered the same particle. Now, the particle is referred as the j/psi particle. The experiment proved the existence of a fourth fundamental subatomic particle called ‘charm’.