Martin perl biography

by Roberto Lalli

Martin Lewis Perl

Nobel Prize in Physics
together with Frederick Reines "for the discovery of the tau lepton".

From Chemical Engineering to Physics
Martin L. Perl was born on June 24, , in New York City to Jewish parents who had emigrated from the former Polish area of Russia around Growing up in a family that was striving to move into the middle class, Martin Perl was motivated to excel as a student in elementary and high school. Early in his life, Perl showed his talent for the sciences and decided to cultivate his natural inclination pursuing a career in a profession that could bring Perl financial stability. In , driven by his interest in chemistry, Perl enrolled at the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn to study chemical engineering.
After having interrupted his course of study to serve as an engineering cadet in the United States Merchant Marine during World War II, Perl earned his bachelor’s degree in Chemical Engineering in His training at the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn would prove to be crucial in Perl’s later work in experimental physics. It provided Perl with a deep knowledge of several aspects of experimental practices (e.g. the strength of materials, manufacturing processes, metallurgy, engineering drawings, etc.), which were not addressed in a traditional physics undergraduate curriculum.
Soon after graduation, Perl joined the General Electric Company. His main area of research concerned the production of electron tubes. Thanks to his involvement in this research, Perl discovered his interests in physics—a discovery that served as a turning point in Perl’s career. While Perl was taking courses in atomic physics and advanced calculus at Union College (Schenectady, NY) to better understand the properties of electron vacuum tubes, the professor of physics Vladimir Rojansky recognized that Perl was much more interested in physics than in chemistry and encouraged Perl to

Martin Lewis Perl was born on June 24, , in Manhattan, New York. He enrolled in the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn, now Polytechnic University, and began studying chemical engineering. His college career was interrupted by the start of World War II. Perl joined the United States Merchant Marine. After the war, he returned to the Polytechnic Institute and received a bachelor degree in Chemical Engineering in Following graduation, he joined the General Electric Company, working as a Chemical Engineer in the Electron Tube Division.

In , he entered the physics doctoral program at Columbia University. After he obtained his Ph.D. in , he had job offers from the Physics Departments at Yale, the University of Illinois, and the University of Michigan. In the end, Perl accepted Michigan’s offer. Perl has been on the faculty at Stanford Linear Accelerator Center SLAC since

In , Perl won the Nobel Prize in Physics, along with Fredrick Reines, for his discovery of the tauon. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and a Fellow of the American Physical Society (APS).

The following press release from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences describes Perl's work:

Mankind seeks his place in nature. He endeavours to find answers to philosophical and physical questions alike. The home of mankind, the Universe, was created in a Big Bang. “What does this Universe consist of?” - "What are the smallest constituents of the Universe and what are their properties?" - "What can they tell us of the history of the Universe and of its future?" etc. This year's laureates have in this search made lasting contributions: They have discovered two of nature's most remarkable subatomic particles.

Martin L. Perl and his colleagues discovered, through a series of experiments between and , at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) in the USA, that the electron has a relative some 3 times heavier, which is called the taut

Martin Perl&

Martin L. Perl, a professor emeritus of physics at Stanford University and SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory who won the  Nobel Prize in physics for discovery of the tau lepton, died Sept. 30 at Stanford Hospital in Palo Alto at the age of

An elementary particle physicist, Perl was widely admired for his persistence and fortitude as a scientist. When he began the series of experiments that would lead to the Nobel Prize, the Standard Model that describes the fundamental particles and forces of nature seemed to be complete, with matter divided into two classes: quarks and leptons.

For many years Perl maintained there was no good reason for there to be two families of leptons, rather than three or even four; and when the SLAC linear accelerator turned on in the early s, he immediately attempted to find a third family. It failed, but he did not give up. In a new series of experiments from to with a machine that could detect much shorter-lived particles, he and his colleagues finally discovered the first member of the third lepton family – the tau lepton, with 3, times the mass of its cousin the electron – in collisions between electrons and positrons, their antimatter opposites.

“People wanted me to be cautious,” Perl recalled in a interview. “We kept taking data and the evidence kept coming in. Every month or so we would get another handful – 10 to 20 – of these funny [particle collision] events. I gave a lot of talks. There would be all sorts of objections. I would take it all down. Some I had direct answers for, and if not, I went back and looked. We eventually eliminated every other explanation. Eventually most of the collaboration, about 30 people, became convinced there was no other explanation. And we published. Eventually other people began to find them, too.”

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American scientist

Martin Lewis Perl (June 24, – September 30, ) was an American chemical engineer and physicist who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 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 founded a printing and advertising company, were Jewishimmigrants to the US from the Polish area of Russia.

Perl was a chemical engineering graduate of Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute (now known as NYU-Tandon) in Brooklyn. After graduation, Perl worked for the General Electric Company, as a chemical engineer in a factory producing electron vacuum tubes. To learn about how the electron tubes worked, Perl signed up for courses in atomic physics and advanced calculus at Union College in Schenectady, New York, which led to his growing interest in physics, and eventually to becoming a graduate student in physics in

He received his Ph.D. from Columbia University in , where his thesis advisor was I.I. Rabi. Perl's thesis described measurements of the nuclear quadrupole moment of sodium, using the atomic beam resonance method that Rabi had won the Nobel Prize in Physics for in

Following his Ph.D., Perl spent 8 years at the 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. 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

Seeking a simpler interaction mechanism to study, Perl started to consider electron and muon interactions. He had the opportunity to start planning experimental work in this area when he moved in to the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC), then being built in California. He was parti