J/psi particle and the charm quark (November Revolution)
Partícula J/psi y quark charm (revolución de noviembre)
- Date
- 1974 · confidence high
- Place
- SLAC, Menlo Park, California / Brookhaven, New York, United States
- Credited to
- Burton Richter; Samuel Ting
- People
- 👤 Burton Richter1931–2018👤 Samuel C. C. Ting1936–
- Field
- Cosmos & Earth
⚠️ Disputed: the sources disagree.
What was discovered
Two groups announce the same discovery on the same day (11 November 1974): a narrow resonance at 3.1 GeV, a bound state of a fourth quark, charm, predicted by the GIM mechanism. It convinces the community of the reality of quarks and the standard model.
Simultaneous discovery: Ting called it J and Richter called it psi; shared Nobel Prize in 1976, only two years later.
What it led to
- Definitive acceptance of the quark model
- Quarkonium spectroscopy
- Third generation (tau 1975, bottom 1977, top 1995)
- Electron-positron colliders
Built on
- The quark model1964
- GIM mechanism (Glashow, Iliopoulos, Maiani, 1970)
- Storage rings
Made possible
- Tau lepton and bottom quark: the third generation1975-1977
- e+e- colliders (SPEAR, PETRA, LEP)