Ting, Samuel Chao Chung, 1936–, American physicist, b. Ann Arbor, Mich., Ph.D. Univ. of Michigan 1962. Ting was a professor at Columbia from 1965 to 1969, when he joined the faculty at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He also does research at Brookhaven National Laboratory. Ting and Burton Richter were jointly awarded the 1976 Nobel Prize in Physics for their discovery in 1974 of a new kind of heavy elementary particle, which Ting called the J particle (now known as the J/psi meson). Working independently, Ting at Brookhaven and Burton at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (now SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory), the two used different methods to make the finding at virtually the same time. The discovery led to the detection of many new subatomic particles. More recently, Ting proposed (1995) and has led the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer project, which developed a particle physics detector (AMS-02) that was added to the International Space Station in 2011. It searches for dark matter and antimatter and measures cosmic rays.
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