- US physicists
who shared the 1980 Nobel Prize for Physics with
James Cronin for their
joint work in particle physics, studying the surprising way certain
mesons change from matter to antimatter.
Fitch was born in Merriman, Nebraska, and educated at McGill University
and Columbia University. He became professor at Princeton University
1960.
The discovery for which Fitch and Cronin received the 1980 Nobel prize
was first published in 1964. They had set up an experiment with the
proton accelerator at the Brookhaven Laboratory in New York to study
the properties of K0 mesons. K0 is a mixture of two 'basic states' which
have a long and a short lifetime and are therefore called K0L and K0S
respectively. These two basic states can also mix together to form not
K0 but an antimatter particle (anti-K0), and K0 can oscillate from particle
to antiparticle through either of its basic states. Fitch and Cronin
found that decays of K0L mesons sometimes violate the known rules, and
so are different from all other known particle interactions.
|