George H. Trilling

George H. Trilling (18 September 1930 – 30 April 2020 ) was an American particle physicist. He was co-discoverer of the J/ψ meson which evinced the existence of the charm quark. Trilling joined the Physics Department faculty at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1960, where he was Department Chair from 1968 through 1972. Trilling was on sabbatical leave to CERN in 1973–74, where he worked on the study of the properties of charm particles, their decay modes and excited states. He was also director of the Physics Division at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory from 1984 until 1987.

Early life and education George was born in Bialystok, Poland, and his family emigrated to France a few months later, where they lived primarily in Nice. In 1940, World War II forced the family to emigrate again, eventually settling in Pasadena, California. He earned his B.S. in electrical engineering in 1951, and his Ph.D. in physics in 1955, both from Caltech. He did one year of postdoctoral studies at Caltech and then studied in France on a Fulbright Fellowship with Louis Leprince-Ringuet.

Career Already as an undergraduate at Caltech, Trilling worked in the laboratory of Carl Anderson, where cosmic rays were observed using cloud chambers. As a graduate student at Caltech, Trilling excelled in Prof. William Smythe's famous course in classical electrodynamics and was named by Smythe as the best student ever to take the course over the many years he taught it. In his thesis work, done in connection with Robert Leighton, Trilling studied "strange" particles, whose name reflected their surprisingly long lifetimes, on the scale of nanoseconds, much more than a trillion times longer than would have been expected. Among these were the strange mesons - kaons - and strange baryonic states including the Lambda. The true nature of the strange particles became clear only with the development of the quark model, which initially had just three quarks, the third being the strange quark.

In 1957, Trilling joined the physics faculty at the University of Michigan, where he was a member of the group headed by Professor Donald A. Glaser, inventor of the bubble chamber, the device that supplanted the cloud chamber. In 1959, Glaser moved to University of California, Berkeley, and recruited Trilling to join him there as a tenured associate professor in 1960. and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1993.

Fields of study Trilling's early research focused on strange particles, especially K mesons. Using bubble chambers, he later studied quasi-two-body processes. At SLAC he was a leader of experiments measuring electron-positron annihilation. In the last stage of his career it was very high energy proton-proton collisions that were his focus.