Cold War particle-physics collaborations

Gerson Sher’s book From Pugwash to Putin, reviewed by Rebecca Charbonneau in Physics Today’s May 2020 issue (page 56), captures his experience as an NSF coordinator and sometime participant in US–Soviet scientific collaborations. But his telling omits significant other Cold War–era US–Soviet collaborations and participants—in particular, the entire area of particle physics.

One major participant was Wolfgang Panofsky, the force behind the creation of SLAC and its first director, an internationally known leader in particle physics, and a highly regarded adviser to policymakers in Washington, DC. Panofsky wrote of his role in international collaborations in his memoir, Panofsky on Physics, Politics and Peace: Pief Remembers, published in 2007, the year in which he passed away. In his book, Panofsky describes a trip to the Soviet Union in 1956—a year before the first Pugwash conference—when he and 14 other scientists were invited to tour a number of high-energy-physics laboratories. He writes that the visit initiated “a new era of communications in high-energy physics.” It was during that trip that he met Gersh Budker, which initiated years of scientific collaboration between the two.

The next major step in particle-physics collaboration came in 1970: a joint high-energy-physics experiment at the Institute for High Energy Physics (IHEP) in Protvino, about 100 km south of Moscow. Darrell Drickey of UCLA and Edouard Tsyganov of the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research (JINR) led the project (see Physics Today, September 1970, page 18 ). I was a young postdoc in the UCLA contingent, which included six scientists and their families, several with young children. The Soviet group included Russians, Uzbeks, Poles, and a Romanian. We Americans lived in Protvino for six months, working through the long Russian winter, forming friendships, and creating indelible memories. Some of the participants got together a few years later at Fermilab to repeat the experiment.

The joint scientific endeavor was in the spirit of détente a full two years before Richard Nixon’s 1972 meeting with Leonid Brezhnev, which Sher refers to as the start of détente. At the time, the IHEP proton accelerator was the highest-energy machine in the world, and the Soviets were keen to provide visibility for their scientific achievement and the science city constructed to house workers and guests.

As a junior member of the US group, I was not party to the behind-the-scenes negotiations to create the collaboration, which the 1970 Physics Today report describes as a years-long effort between the US Atomic Energy Commission and the USSR State Committee for the Utilization of Atomic Energy. I was told at Panofsky’s memorial symposium at Stanford University in 2010 that he also was involved.

The story behind the UCLA–JINR partnership and the topic of US–USSR particle-physics collaborations would have added an important piece to the history that Sher endeavors to cover in his book.