Henry Way Kendall Created 2026-10-18 Updated 2026-11-05
Henry Way Kendall coauthored measurements of deep inelastic scattering that exposed structure inside the proton. Measuring the scattered electron's energy and direction determines the energy and momentum transferred to the target. The extracted structure function showed approximate scaling under the paper's stated assumptions, providing evidence for pointlike constituents. The test depended on systematic comparisons across collision kinematics rather than a visual image of a quark.[ref]
Figure 1.
Portrait of Henry Way Kendall
. Tom Frost; source Yosemite Climbing Association; existing Commons crop. CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Source.
Nobel Prize in Physics in 1990 Created 2026-10-18 Updated 2026-10-20
Awarded in equal thirds to Jerome Isaac Friedman, Henry Way Kendall and Richard Edward Taylor for investigations of deep inelastic scattering of electrons from protons and bound neutrons, essential to developing the quark model.[ref]
SLAC-MIT deep inelastic electron scattering experiment Created 2026-10-18 Updated 2026-10-25
Starting in 1967, a collaboration at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology directed an electron beam at liquid hydrogen, providing proton targets. Jerome Isaac Friedman, Henry Way Kendall and Richard Edward Taylor participated in this experimental program.[ref]
The 1969 paper Observed Behavior of Highly Inelastic Electron-Proton Scattering reports inclusive electron spectra at and with incident energies from to . Its scaling comparison estimated under a transverse-virtual photon assumption, finding approximate agreement as a function of for and . These are the paper's conditions, not a claim of exact Bjorken scaling at every momentum transfer.[ref]