Aachen honours laureates Rubbia and Ting
The Rheinisch Westfälische Technische Hochschule (RWTH), Aachen, chose a particularly suitable academic tribute to CERN's 50th anniversary, by granting Carlo Rubbia and Samuel Ting the Doktor rerum naturalium honoris causa on 22 November.
To begin the celebration, former director-general Herwig Schopper summarized CERN's history, highlighting its scientific successes and its contributions to bringing nations together peacefully. Then in his laudatio Günther Flügge of RWTH outlined the scientific careers of the two outstanding scientists.
When modern particle physics began in the late 1960s and early 1970s Rubbia and Ting were already highly respected experimentalists, and groups from Aachen, centred on Helmut Faissner and Albrecht Boehm, were already working with Rubbia. Then in November 1974 news broke of the discovery by Ting and his team, then at Brookhaven, of the J particle - discovered also (as the Ψ) by Burton Richter's group at SLAC (see CERN Courier December 2004 p25). For their discovery Ting and Richter were awarded the Nobel prize in 1976.
That same year Rubbia came up with his revolutionary idea of a proton-antiproton collider at the International Neutrino Conference in Aachen, paving the way to his discovery of the heavy vector bosons, W and Z.
Meanwhile Ting had moved to DESY to set up the MarkJ experiment at the new PETRA electron-positron collider, then the highest-energy machine of its kind worldwide. Several groups from Aachen joined MarkJ and other collaborations at PETRA. Success came soon after the machine was switched on - in 1978 the first evidence for gluons, the carriers of the strong interaction, was seen, and in 1979 their existence was finally established (see CERN Courier November 2004 p33).
In 1978 Rubbia also set up the UA1 collaboration at CERN to build a detector for the hunt for the heavy bosons, with major contributions from Aachen, which provided the big muon chambers that covered the outside of the huge detector. The W and Z bosons were discovered in 1983, and the following year Rubbia was awarded the Nobel prize together with Simon van der Meer.
In the meantime CERN had opted for the new Large Electron Positron collider, LEP. Like many researchers at PETRA, Ting moved his activity to the new machine to build the gigantic L3 detector. This time he could convince all the high-energy physics institutes in Aachen to join his enterprise.
LEP was a great success. It showed that the current Standard Model remains valid even under the closest scrutiny. However, the masses of the particles vary widely and their origin is not understood at all. To attack such problems, Rubbia, who became director-general of CERN in 1989, pushed for the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) to be built in the LEP tunnel. One of the important meetings to prepare for the LHC took place in Aachen in 1990 and attracted more than 500 people; several groups at Aachen are now involved in the experimental programme.
The two laureates are now working on new projects: at the meeting Rubbia presented "The Future of Energy" and Ting "The Anti Matter Universe". Some groups in Aachen have again joined in this latter activity, with the antimatter search in space with the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer. The ceremony illustrated the successes of the collaboration of RWTH and other universities with two brilliant scientists within the framework of two great laboratories - altogether a fitting celebration of CERN's 50th anniversary.
Particle physics goes on the road in India
In a tour organized and sponsored by the British Council of India, Peter Kalmus, emeritus professor at Queen Mary, University of London, recently visited India to give lectures on particle physics.
He gave 15 talks in 10 days in Delhi, Kolkata, Mumbai, Pune, Ahmedabad and Bhopal, to audiences ranging from 14-year-old pupils to university academics and national laboratory staff, as well as members of the general public. There were also discussions with Indian scientists and staff of the British Council, as well as interviews with newspaper and television journalists.
An experienced speaker in the UK and elsewhere, Kalmus noted interesting differences in India. These included Hindu prayers sung by 14-year-old girls before and after his talk, the presentation of flowers and other gifts, and celebrity treatment such as requests from the audience for autographs and photographs. The tour involved a great deal of travelling, but as the presentations had been e-mailed to India in advance, and computer-projection worked at all venues, Kalmus had no need for his laptop, and even the back-up CD-ROM was not used. This left the speaker able to savour the enthusiasm of the audiences, who asked many good questions, and the friendship shown by his hosts at all the venues.