Val Logsdon Fitch

Val Logsdon Fitch
Born	(1923-03-10) March 10, 1923 Merriman, Nebraska
Alma mater	Columbia McGill University
Known for	Discovery of CP-violation
Awards	John Price Wetherill Medal (1976) Nobel Prize in Physics (1980)
Scientific career
Fields	Particle physics
Institutions	Princeton

Val Logsdon Fitch (born March 10, 1923, Merriman, Nebraska, USA) is an American nuclear physicist. A native of Merriman, Nebraska, he graduated from Gordon High School and attended Chadron State College for three years before being drafted into the U.S. army in 1943. He later graduated from McGill University with a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering in 1948 and completed his Ph.D. in physics in 1954 from Columbia University. In World War II, he worked on the Manhattan Project in Los Alamos. He is a member of the faculty at Princeton University.

Fitch and co-researcher James Watson Cronin were awarded the 1980 Nobel Prize in Physics for a 1964 experiment using the Alternating Gradient Synchrotron at Brookhaven National Laboratory that proved that certain subatomic reactions do not adhere to fundamental symmetry principles. Specifically, they proved, by examining the decay of K-mesons, that a reaction run in reverse does not merely retrace the path of the original reaction, which showed that the reactions of subatomic particles are not indifferent to time. Thus the phenomenon of CP violation was discovered.

Fitch is a member of the Board of Sponsors of The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.

Publications

• Fitch, V. "Some Notes on Wideband Feedback Amplifiers", Los Alamos National Laboratory, United States Department of Energy (through predecessor agency the Atomic Energy Commission), (March 16, 1949).
• Fitch, V. "A High Resolution Scale-of-four", Columbia University, United States Department of Energy (through predecessor agency the Atomic Energy Commission), (August 25, 1949).
• Fitch, V. L. "CP Violation, Neutral Currents, and Weak Equivalence", Princeton University, United States Department of Energy (through predecessor agency the Atomic Energy Commission), (March 23, 1972).
• Cester, R.; Fitch, V. L.; Montag, A.; Sherman, S.; Webb, R. C. & M. S. Witherell. "Results on the Performance of a Broad Band Focussing Cherenkov Counter", Princeton University, United States Department of Energy, (1980).

External links

• Photograph, Biography and Bibliographic Resources, from the Office of Scientific and Technical Information, United States Department of Energy

• Research page from the Princeton University Physics department
• Val Logsdon Fitch
• the discovery of violations of fundamental symmetry principles in the decay of neutral K-mesons