Martin Lewis Perl

Martin Lewis Perl (June 24, 1927 – September 30,

2014) was an American chemical engineer and Martin Lewis Perl
physicist who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1995
for his discovery of the tau lepton.

Life and career

Perl was born in New York City, New York. His
parents, Fay (née Resenthal), a secretary and
bookkeeper, and Oscar Perl, a stationery salesman who
Born June 24, 1927
founded a printing and advertising company, were
New York City, New York
Jewish immigrants to the US from the Polish area of
Russia.[1][2] Died September 30, 2014 (aged 87)
Palo Alto, California
Perl was a 1948 chemical engineering graduate of Nationality American
Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute (now known as NYU-
Alma mater New York University Tandon
Tandon) in Brooklyn. After graduation, Perl worked
School of Engineering and
for the General Electric Company, as a chemical
Columbia University
engineer in a factory producing electron vacuum tubes.
To learn about how the electron tubes worked, Perl Known for Tau lepton
signed up for courses in atomic physics and advanced Children Jed Perl
calculus at Union College in Schenectady, New York, Awards Nobel Prize in Physics in 1995
which led to his growing interest in physics, and
Scientific career
eventually to becoming a graduate student in physics
Fields Physics
in 1950.[1]
Institutions University of Michigan
He received his Ph.D. from Columbia University in Stanford Linear Accelerator
1955, where his thesis advisor was I.I. Rabi. Perl's Center (SLAC)
thesis described measurements of the nuclear University of Liverpool
quadrupole moment of sodium, using the atomic beam Doctoral I. I. Rabi
resonance method that Rabi had won the Nobel Prize advisor
in Physics for in 1944.[1]
Doctoral Melissa Franklin, Samuel C. C.
Following his Ph.D., Perl spent 8 years at the students Ting
University of Michigan, where he worked on the
physics of strong interactions, using bubble chambers and spark chambers to study the scattering of pions
and later neutrons on protons.[1] While at Michigan, Perl and Lawrence W. Jones served as co-advisors to
Samuel C. C. Ting, who earned the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1976.
Seeking a simpler interaction mechanism to study, Perl started to consider electron and muon
interactions.[3] He had the opportunity to start planning experimental work in this area when he moved in
1963 to the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC), then being built in California. He was
particularly interested in understanding the muon: why it should interact almost exactly like the electron
but be 206.8 times heavier, and why it should decay through the route that it does. Perl chose to look for
answers to these questions in experiments on high-energy charged leptons. In addition, he considered the
possibility of finding a third generation of lepton through electron-positron collisions.[2]

Perl is one of the 20 American recipients of the Nobel Prize in Physics to sign a letter addressed to
President George W. Bush in May 2008, urging him to "reverse the damage done to basic science
research in the Fiscal Year 2008 Omnibus Appropriations Bill" by requesting additional emergency
funding for the Department of Energy's Office of Science, the National Science Foundation, and the
National Institute of Standards and Technology.[4]

He died after a heart attack[5] at Stanford University Hospital on September 30, 2014, at the age of 87.[6]
His son, Jed Perl, is an author and art critic for The New Republic.[5]

Discovery of the tau particle

The tau lepton (τ, also called the tau particle, tauon or simply tau) is an elementary particle similar to the
electron, with negative electric charge and a spin of 1⁄2, but with 3477 times the mass. Together with the
electron, the muon, and the three neutrinos, it is classified as a lepton.[2][7]

The tau was first detected in a series of experiments between 1974 and 1977 by Perl with his colleagues
+ −
at the SLAC-LBL group.[8] Their equipment consisted of SLAC's then-new e –e colliding ring, called
SPEAR, and the LBL magnetic detector. They could detect and distinguish between leptons, hadrons and
photons. SPEAR was able to collide electrons and positrons at higher energies than had previously been
possible, initially at up to 4.8 GeV and eventually at 8 GeV, energies high enough to lead to the
production of a tau/antitau pair.[3] The tau has a lifetime of only 2.9 × 10−13 s and so these particles
decayed within a few millimetres of the collision.[9] Hence Perl and his coworkers did not detect the tau
directly, but rather discovered anomalous events where they detected either an electron and a muon, or a
positron and an antimuon:[10]

We have discovered 64 events of the form

+ − ± ∓
e + e → e + μ + at least two undetected particles

for which we have no conventional explanation.

The need for at least two undetected particles was shown by the inability to conserve energy and
momentum with only one. However, no other muons, electrons, photons, or hadrons were detected. It was
proposed that this event was the production and subsequent decay of a new particle pair:
+ − + − ± ∓
e + e → τ + τ → e + μ + 4ν
 + −
This was difficult to verify, because the energy to produce the τ τ pair is similar to the threshold for D
meson production. Work done at DESY-Hamburg, and with the Direct Electron Counter (DELCO) at
SPEAR, subsequently confirmed the discovery[2] and established the mass and spin of the tau.

The symbol τ was derived from the Greek τρίτον (triton, meaning "third" in English), since it was the
third charged lepton discovered.[11]

Nobel Prize and later career

Perl won the Nobel Prize in 1995 jointly with Frederick Reines. The prize was awarded "for pioneering
experimental contributions to lepton physics". Perl received half "for the discovery of the tau lepton"
while Reines received his share "for the detection of the neutrino".[12] In 1996 he published Reflections
on Experimental Science, which consists of "comments, scientific reprints, reflections, and a memoir
...".[13]

He joined University of Liverpool as a visiting professor.[14] He served on the board of advisors of

Scientists and Engineers for America, an organization focused on promoting sound science in American
government. In 1996, he received the Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement.[15]
In 2009, Perl received an honorary doctorate from the University of Belgrade.[16]

See also
List of Jewish Nobel laureates

References
1. "Martin L. Perl - Biographical" ([Link]
95/[Link]). Nobel Media AB. 1995. Retrieved 2013-12-28.
2. Feldman, Gary; Jaros, John; Schindler, Rafe H. (12 October 2017). "Martin L. Perl (1927–
2014): A Biographical Memoir" ([Link]
Annual Review of Nuclear and Particle Science. 67 (1): 1–18.
Bibcode:2017ARNPS..67....1F ([Link]
doi:10.1146/annurev-nucl-061317-093426 ([Link]
-093426).
3. Martin L. Perl (1995). "Reflections on the Discovery of the Tau Lepton" ([Link]
[Link]/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/1995/[Link]). Retrieved 2013-12-28.
4. "A Letter from America's Physics Nobel Laureates" ([Link]
[Link]) (PDF).
5. Overbye, Dennis (3 October 2014). "Martin Perl, 87, Dies; Nobel Laureate Discovered
Subatomic Particle" ([Link]
-[Link]). The New York Times.
6. "Stanford's Martin L. Perl, winner of 1995 Nobel Prize for discovery of tau lepton, dead at
87" ([Link] October
2014.
7. Woolfson, M. M. (2010). Materials, Matter & Particles: A Brief History ([Link]
om/books?id=MQmPWnTkB2kC&pg=PA268). World Scientific. ISBN 978-1-84816-461-1.
 8. Perl, M. L.; Abrams, G.; Boyarski, A.; Breidenbach, M.; Briggs, D.; Bulos, F.; Chinowsky, W.;
+ −
Dakin, J.; et al. (1975). "Evidence for Anomalous Lepton Production in e e Annihilation".
Physical Review Letters. 35 (22): 1489. Bibcode:1975PhRvL..35.1489P ([Link]
[Link]/abs/1975PhRvL..35.1489P). doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.35.1489 ([Link]
0.1103%2FPhysRevLett.35.1489).
9. "The Nobel Prize in Physics 1995 - Press Release" ([Link]
s/physics/laureates/1995/[Link]). Nobel Media AB. 1995. Retrieved 2014-01-01.
10. Halyo, Valerie (December 2014). "Martin L. Perl (1927–2014)" ([Link]
16330a). Nature. 516 (7531): 330. Bibcode:2014Natur.516..330H ([Link]
edu/abs/2014Natur.516..330H). doi:10.1038/516330a ([Link]
ISSN 1476-4687 ([Link] PMID 25519123 ([Link]
[Link]/25519123). S2CID 4405993 ([Link]
D:4405993).
11. M.L. Perl (1977). "Evidence for, and properties of, the new charged heavy lepton" ([Link]
[Link]/pubs/slacpubs/1750/[Link]) (PDF). In T. Thanh Van (ed.).
Proceedings of the XII Rencontre de Moriond. SLAC-PUB-1923.
12. "Nobel Prize in Physics, 1995" ([Link]
995/). 1995. Retrieved 2013-12-28.
13. Perl, Martin L. (1996). Reflections on Experimental Science ([Link]
s?id=3ewT6ZXygHsC&pg=PR9). World Scientific Series in 20th Century Physics – Vol. 14.
World Scientific. p. ix. ISBN 9810225741.
14. "Professor Martin Perl joins University of Liverpool" ([Link]
-merseyside-16018296). BBC. 3 December 2011. Retrieved 3 December 2011.
15. "Golden Plate Awardees of the American Academy of Achievement" ([Link]
g/our-history/golden-plate-awards/#science-exploration). [Link]. American
Academy of Achievement.
16. "Promovisani počasni doktori Beogradskog univerziteta - RADIO-TELEVIZIJA VOJVODINE"
([Link]
[Link]). [Link]. 2009-10-20. Retrieved 2011-02-17.

External links
Media related to Martin Lewis Perl at Wikimedia Commons

Martin L. Perl ([Link] on [Link] including the

Nobel Lecture, December 8, 1995 Reflections on the Discovery of the Tau Lepton
Nobel Prize press release, explaining the significance of Perl's work ([Link]
org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/1995/[Link])
Personal blog: Reflections on Physics ([Link]
[Link]/)
U.S. Patent 5943075 ([Link]
[Link]/patent/[Link]) Universal fluid droplet ejector (Martin Lewis Perl)
U.S. Patent 5975682 ([Link]
[Link]/patent/[Link]) Two-dimensional fluid droplet arrays generated using a single
nozzle (Martin Lewis Perl)
Gary Feldman, John Jaros, and Rafe H. Schindler, "Martin L. Perl", Biographical Memoirs of
the National Academy of Sciences (2016) ([Link]
al-memoirs/memoir-pdfs/[Link])

Retrieved from "[Link]