What is Martin Perl known for?
I am best known for discovering the tau lepton, a fundamental particle that is a heavier cousin of the electron and muon. This discovery, made in 1975 at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, was a surprise because it showed that there is a third generation of leptons, which was not predicted by any theory at the time. The tau lepton is about 3,500 times more massive than the electron, and it decays quickly into other particles. I spent years designing and building the detector, the SLAC-LBL Mark I, to look for these events. The evidence was clear: we saw pairs of particles that could only come from a new lepton. It took the physics community a while to accept it, but the data were undeniable. For this work, I received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1995.
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