http://t.co/KGVNarwZMG by @ulaulaman about #CarloRubbia #NobelPrize #physics #particlephysics
On that day 30 years ago, I was almost certainly at school. Physics still was not my passion. Of course I started very well: when the teacher asked
what is the space, I thought immediately to the universe, but the question was not referring to that "space", but in another, the geometric. But it is not about those memories that I have to indulge, but on a particular photo, in which
Carlo Rubbia and
Simon van der Meer, with two goblets, presumably of wine in hand, are celebrating the announcement of the
Nobel Prize for Physics
for their decisive contributions to the large project, which led to the discovery of the field particles W and Z, communicators of weak interaction
The story of this Nobel, however, began eight years earlier, in 1976. In that year, in fact,
SPS, the Super Proton Synchrotron, begins to operate at CERN, originally designed to accelerate particles up to an energy of 300 GeV.
The same year David Cline, Carlo Rubbia and Peter McIntyre proposed transforming the SPS into a proton-antiproton collider, with proton and antiproton beams counter-rotating in the same beam pipe to collide head-on. This would yield centre-of-mass energies in the 500-700 GeV range(1).
On the other hand antiprotons must be somehow collected. The corresponding beam was then
(...) stochastically cooled in the antiproton accumulator at 3.5 GeV, and this is where the expertise of Simon Van der Meer and coworkers played a decisive role(1).
