Sau Lan Wu (Chinese: 吳秀蘭; born May 11, 1940) is a Chinese-American particle physicist and the Enrico Fermi Distinguished Professor of Physics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
She made important contributions towards the discovery of the J/psi particle, which provided experimental evidence for the existence of the charm quark, and the gluon, the vector boson of the strong force in the Standard Model of physics.
[2] Wu was born in the early 1940s during the Japanese occupation of Hong Kong and went to Vassar College in 1960 with a full scholarship for her undergraduate degree.
This led them to suspect that they had discovered a new stable particle decaying into electron-positron pairs, the same one found by Richter at the SPEAR collider in the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory.
Wu was a key contributor to the discovery of the gluon, a particle that binds, or glues, quarks together to form protons and neutrons.
In 1979 she published a paper with George Zobernig on a method of three-jet analysis in electron-positron annihilation,[10] that was used in the following publication with the entire TASSO Collaboration,[11] regarded as the first evidence of a gluon.