Word: cern
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...future Nobels. Last week, even as this year's Nobel winners were reacting to their awards, two teams of physicists made just such a landmark announcement. In rival statements -- one from the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center in California, the other from the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva -- scientists disclosed findings they say establishes beyond a reasonable doubt that the universe contains precisely three fundamental types, or families, of matter. No more, no less...
...significance of the new findings was underscored by the haste with which they were revealed. The Stanford team, led by Burton Richter (a 1976 Nobel laureate), went public first, issuing a press release only one day before a European symposium at which CERN's findings were to have been presented. That led to charges of bad sportsmanship from some of the CERN team, led by Carlo Rubbia (1984 Nobel), whose results are said to be more accurate and even more definitive...
...while the unexpected is always possible, CERN physicists do have a specific quarry to start with. As soon as the LEP has been put through its paces, they will begin taking a hard look at a particle called the Z 0, which will emerge in great numbers from the electron-positron collisions. The discovery of the Z 0 and two related particles, W+ and W-, in 1982 and 1983 won a Nobel for CERN scientists Rubbia and Simon van der Meer. The three particles carry the weak nuclear force, one of the four fundamental forces of nature, which is responsible...
Many experts think that is unlikely. Richter bet on a new approach to accelerator design, sending the positrons and electrons down a two-mile-long straight track, then spinning them out in opposing semicircles before colliding them. The CERN machine is more conventional and thus more likely to work from the start. The positrons and electrons in the LEP are made to circle repeatedly in opposite directions through the tunnel, with new particles added periodically to the stream. In a given period of time, the LEP is expected to produce hundreds of times as many Z 0s as the Stanford...
...Although CERN's staff tries to be diplomatic about competition with the U.S. in particle physics, there is little doubt that the LEP has given the Europeans a major advantage. "I don't think of science as a football game," says Ugo Amaldi, who oversees one of the LEP's detectors. "But if you look at the number of American scientists coming here, it is clear that our way of doing things is attracting interest...