From the Proton Synchrotron to the Large Hadron Collider: 50 Years of Nobel Memories in High-Energy Physics

As a new era in particle physics approaches with the start of the LHC, a symposium to commemorate many significant events that have marked high-energy physics in the past 50 years will be held at CERN on 3-4 December 2009.
The list of confirmed distinguished speakers reads like the Who’s Who of particle physics of the second half of the 20th Century, including the Nobel Laureates James Cronin, Jerome Friedman, Sheldon Glashow, David Gross, Gerardus ‘t Hooft, Leon Lederman, Burton Richter, Carlo Rubbia, Jack Steinberger, Samuel Ting, Martinus Veltman, Stephen Weinberg and Frank Wilczek. They will share with us memories of several landmark events that, over the past 50 years, have shaped our field of science. These events include the discovery of the J/ψ particle by Richter and Ting in the 1970s; the work of Glashow, Salam and Weinberg on the theory of the unified weak and electromagnetic interactions; the discovery of fundamental asymmetries in the K-meson sector by Cronin and Fitch; the contributions to the SPS proton-antiproton collider by Rubbia and van der Meer that led to the discovery of the W and Z bosons in the 1980s; the discovery of the muon neutrino by Lederman, Schwartz and Steinberger; the SLAC experiments of Friedman, Kendall and Taylor in deep-inelastic scattering of electrons in the 1960s; the development of the mathematical basis of the electroweak theory by ‘t Hooft and Veltman in the 1970s; and the discovery of asymptotic freedom in the theory of strong interactions by Gross, Politzer and Wilczek.

The year 2009 also marks the 50th anniversary of the commissioning of CERN’s Proton Synchrotron and the 20th anniversary of the start-up of LEP. A review of these CERN's machines that have greatly contributed to the physics developments listed above will be given by Lyndon Evans, Stephen Myers, Emilio Picasso and Guenther Plass, while a look at the future of CERN’s accelerator complex will be provided by CERN Director-General Rolf-Dieter Heuer.

by Directorate Office