science · 30 September 2014 · 10 years ago
death
Died 30 Sep 2014 at age 87 (born 24 Jun 1927).
Martin Lewis Perl was an American physicist who received the 1995 Nobel Prize for Physics for discovering a subatomic particle that he named the tau, a massive lepton with a negative charge. The tau, which he found in the mid-1970s, was the first evidence of a third “generation” of fundamental particles. It is a superheavy cousin of the electron, identical in all respects except that the tau is more than 3,500 times heavier than the electron and survives less than a trillionth of a second, whereas the electron is stable.
OnThisDay.net