Samuel C. C. Ting
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
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Primary Section: 13, Physics Membership Type:
Member
(elected 1977)
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Biosketch
Samuel Ting, Nobel Laureate in Physics, is the Thomas Dudley Cabot Professor of Physics at the MIT. Ting has always proposed and led international collaborations in experimental physics using accelerators in the U.S., Germany and Switzerland and on board the U.S. Space Shuttle Discovery and the International Space Station. His contributions include: Discovery of a new kind of matter (the J particle) at the Brookhaven National Laboratory. Discovery of the gluon (the particle responsible for transmitting the nuclear force). Proposed and leads the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS) experiment on the ISS. AMS results have changed our understanding of the cosmos.
Research Interests
I am the founder and Principal Investigator of the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS) deployed on the International Space Station in 2011. AMS is a multi-purpose magnetic spectrometer measuring cosmic rays up to TeV energies. Its precision, large acceptance and ability to identify particle types over a large energy range during its long duration mission make it unique in astroparticle physics. The main goals of the AMS Experiment include the search for an understanding of dark matter, the properties of charged cosmic rays, the search for antimatter and, most importantly, to search for unknown physics phenomena from its unique position in space. AMS is a large international collaboration of physicists from 44 institutes and 14 countries. In nearly ten years on orbit, AMS has collected more than 170 billion cosmic ray events and published 20 major physics results in Physical Review Letters and more are in process including a detailed summary of the AMS Experiment published in Physics Reports. None of these published results agree with current models or theories. AMS challenges our understanding of the cosmos.
