This book tells the story of a unique scientific and human adventure, following the life and science of Bruno Touschek, an Austrian born physicist, who conceived and built AdA, the first matter-antimatter colliding-beam storage ring, the ancestor of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN where the Higgs Boson was discovered in 2012. Making extensive use of archival sources and personal correspondence, the author offers for the first time a unified history of European efforts to build modern-day particle accelerators, from the dark times of war-ravaged Europe up to the rebuilding of science in Germany, UK, Italy and France through the 1950s and early 1960s. This book, the result of several years of scholarly research work, includes numerous previously unpublished photos as well as original drawings by Bruno Touschek.

Autorentext

GIULIA PANCHERI collaborated with Bruno Touschek after graduating from Rome University in 1966. An active particle physicist, fellow of the American Physical Society since 2009, she founded the LNF Bruno Touschek Spring School. Her collaboration with Luisa Bonolis on Bruno Touschek's life and works won the 2011 Italian Physical Society Prize for the history of Physics. She lives in Rome and is a senior eminent scientist associated to INFN Frascati Laboratories.

Inhalt

Introduction (including about the European roads to particle colliders).- Touschek came from Vienna.- The road from Norway: Rolf Widerøe and the Strahlentransformator.- Touschek and Widerøe during WWII: between Hamburg and Berlin.- Bruno Touschek in Germany after the War: 1945-46.- Becoming a theoretical physicist in Glasgow: 1947-1952.- A Laboratory on the hills: Frascati and the Italian road to particle accelerators.- Bruno Touschek in Rome: January 1953-June 1959.- Touschek's revolutionary proposal and the construction of a matter-antimatter ring in Frascati.- The French connection: from Frascati to the Linear Accelerator Laboratory at Orsay.- Bruno Touschek and Carlo Bernardini with AdA in Orsay.- Epilogue : After AdA.