Nobel Prize to Rubbia and van der Meer for Finding W and Z

Carlo Rubbia and Simon van der Meer of CERN share the 1984 Nobel prize in physics for “their decisive contributions to the large project which led to the discovery of the field particles W and Z, communicators of weak interaction.” In 1976 Rubbia and his collaborators had the idea of converting the Super Proton Synchrotron at CERN into a proton‐antiproton collider, where the W and Z particles could be created. In 1968 van der Meer had invented the method of stochastic cooling, which allowed the dense packing and storage of enough antiprotons to make the W and Z in pp̄ collisions. The CERN pp̄ collider project, the largest ever to appear in the context of the Nobel prize, yielded its first collisions in 1981. Two year later, in 1983, both the W and Z were observed by the UA1 detector group led by Rubbia and by the UA2 detector group. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, in announcing the award, said, “Two persons in the CERN project are outstanding—Carlo Rubbia, who had and developed the idea, and Simon van der Meer, whose invention made it feasible.” This year’s prize, which is worth about $193 000, is the first to honor work done at CERN.

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