Martin Perl, Nobelist and particle physics maverick, dies at 87

Martin Perl, a particle physicist at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in Menlo Park, California, who died 30 September, was something of a lone wolf when he set out to see if there was another particle akin to the electron and its heavier unstable cousin, the muon. Perl's hunch was right, and by 1977 he and his colleagues had discovered the particle, dubbed the tau lepton, in experiments using SLAC's famous linear accelerator.
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