Particle physicist Dr. Sau Lan Wu has participated in three major discoveries, playing a leading role in two. Her contributions towards the discovery of the J/psi particle provided experimental evidence for the existence of the charm quark, the gluon, and the vector boson in the Standard Model of particle physics.
Dr. Wu is the Enrico Fermi Distinguished Professor of Physics and a Vilas Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She was born during the Japanese occupation of Hong Kong in the early 1940s during World War II and grew up in poverty. Her mother was a concubine of a wealthy Chinese businessman who was thrown out by his main wife.
As a child, the future Dr. Wu slept next to a rice shop and attended school in the slums. But she was determined to become financially independent of men and knew that education was the key. She randomly selected 50 universities from a library book, submitted her applications, and won a full scholarship to Vassar College with intentions of becoming an artist.
Inspired by Marie Curie, Wu instead devoted her life to physics, and graduated summa cum laude after completing her degree in three years. She chose Harvard for her master’s and doctorate. After graduating in 1970, MIT offered Dr. Wu a research associate position.
In 1974, Dr. Wu and her team at the Brookhaven National Laboratory observed the J/psi particle, heralding the existence of a fourth kind of quark, now called the charm quark. Dubbed the November Revolution, this discovery led to the development of the Standard Model of particle physics. Later in the 1970s, Dr. Wu did much of the math and analysis that led to the discovery of the gluon, a particle that binds quarks together to form protons and neutrons.
In 1995, she was a co-recipient of the European Physical Society Prize for High-Energy Physics for her gluon findings. She then became one of the group leaders for the ATLAS experiment, one of the two collaborations at the Large Hadron Collider that in 2012 discovered the Higgs boson, sometimes referred to as the “God Particle.” The groundbreaking discovery, which completed the Standard Model, received major coverage in the news media.
Dr. Wu is a Fellow of the American Physical Society, Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the topic of several books as an inspiring scientist figure for young students. She continues to search for new particles that would transcend the Standard Model and push physics forward.