Fitch, Val Logsdon 1923-
US physicist and Nobel Prize winner

Born in Merriman, Nebraska, he was originally interested in chemistry, but after working on the Manhattan atomic bomb project at Los Alamos his interests switched to physics. He was educated at McGill and Columbia universities, and in 1954 moved to Princeton University where he became professor in 1960 and James S McDonnell Distinguished University Professor of Physics in 1984. Using the Nevis cyclotron, Fitch and James Rainwater studied muonic atoms. These are atoms where an orbital electron is replaced by its heavier relative, the muon. From observations of one of the spectral lines (the K-line) they deduced that the nuclear radii was smaller than had previously been believed, which was later verified in the experiments of Robert Hofstadter. In 1964 together with James Cronin and others, Fitch observed the non-conservation of the combined symmetry of parity and charge conjugation in the weak decays of neutral kaons. For this work Fitch and Cronin shared the 1980 Nobel Prize for physics.