Edited by Björn H Wiik, Albrecht Wagner and Horst Wenninger, World Scientific. Hardback ISBN 9812381996, £53 ($78).
In 2000, the city of Bologna was the European Capital for Culture. To mark the occasion the University of Bologna and its Academy of Sciences published the achievements of their most distinguished members in the field of science and technology. This collection acknowledges the contributions of Antonino Zichichi and his colleagues in the development of experimental techniques that have contributed to the discovery of new particles and phenomena in the field of high-energy physics.
The collection was originally prepared by Björn Wiik, who at the time was director of DESY. After Wiik’s untimely death in 1999, Albrecht Wagner, Wiik’s successor, continued and completed his work, with the help of Horst Wenninger of CERN.
In his introduction Wiik recalls how in the early 1960s, when the dominant detector was the bubble chamber and the dominating field of interest was the physics of hadrons and neutrinos, Zichichi started to study the unfashionable topic of lepton-pair production in hadronic interactions. During the 1960s and early 1970s, Zichichi and colleagues, mainly working at CERN, developed a number of techniques to help in the problem of particle identification. This foresight was vindicated with the discovery in 1974 of the J/Ψ particle. The “pre shower” technology was essential to this discovery. In fact, this early emphasis on the development of innovative detection techniques continued to be one of Zichichi’s main scientific motivations.
The first section of this collection contains the major contributions from Zichichi and his co-workers on the development of three techniques that have come to be widely used in high-energy physics experiments: the “early shower development” method (universally used and now called the “pre shower” method), the study of range curves for high-energy muons in order to discriminate against pion penetration (“muon punch-through method”), and the “lead scintillator sandwich telescope” – the precursor of today’s calorimeters.
In the second section there are original papers by Zichichi and colleagues on high-precision time-of-flight (TOF) counters and the neutron missing-mass spectrometer technique. This section also includes an extract of a paper by Federico Palmonari on the AMS experiment. This experiment uses a TOF system that relies heavily on the early work of Zichichi and his colleagues at Bologna and CERN.
The third part of the collection describes the achievements of the LAA project. This was initiated by Zichichi, funded by the Italian government and implemented at CERN in 1986. The goal of the project was to prove the feasibility of a series of detector technologies that could be used in a future multi-TeV hadron collider. Zichichi had long promoted the construction in his native Sicily of a very high-energy hadron collider, the “Eloisatron”, with a collision energy of 200-1000 TeV and luminosities of up to 1036 cm-2 s-1. The machine parameters that served as a basis of the LAA project were those of a 10% model of the Eloisatron, surprisingly close to those of the LHC. The book reproduces the CERN report by Zichichi on the main achievements of the LAA project. All aspects of detector layout were considered in the project and, in view of the demands of the machine, special attention was paid to radiation hardness, rate capability, hermeticity and momentum resolution of the detector assemblies.
From 1990 to 1996 the LAA was transformed into the CERN Detector R&D. The fourth section is a review by Wenninger of the impact of the results from these two programmes on the design of the LHC detectors. Although the solutions adopted for the LHC may differ from those studied at the LAA, Wenninger argues convincingly that the initial work had a great influence and measurable impact on the design of the present LHC detectors.
Through this collection of papers, which touch only on one aspect of his work, Zichichi emerges as a person highly motivated by the development of experimental techniques to meet the challenges of future high-energy particle-physics experiments. The early work carried out directly by Zichichi and colleagues and the later LAA work that he inspired have certainly had a significant and continuing influence on particle detector design.
