Golden Jubilee photos: The first experiments

A year after the commissioning of the Synchrocyclotron (SC), the first experiments were already starting to bear fruit. In July 1958, Tito Fazzini, Giuseppe Fidecaro, Alec Merrison, Helmut Paul and Alvin Tollestrup produced conclusive evidence that approximately one pion in ten thousand decayed into an electron and a neutrino, as predicted by the weak interaction theory. This, the first of CERN's great discoveries, effectively put an end to the controversy that had been raging at the time.
A few years later, Giuseppe Fidecaro began a collaboration at CERN with his wife Maria. In the image, Giuseppe and Maria Fidecaro in 1963, surrounded by spark chambers, inside the detector for the experiment on the decay of the rho meson into a pi meson and a photon.