Word: rubbia
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...carriers of the weak force, just as photons transmit the electromagnetic force. But bosons are more elusive than photons. Although nearly 100 times as heavy as protons, they could not be forged in any existing accelerator. While physicists in the U.S. and elsewhere began designing new machines, Rubbia, who divides his time between Harvard and CERN, the French acronym for the Geneva-based European Organization for Nuclear Research, decided that there must be an easier, cheaper way. He persuaded CERN to let him modify its major accelerator, the Super Proton Synchrotron, to achieve higher energies. Instead of sending nuclear bullets...
...unleashed his ideas in staccato bursts and gesticulated with the verve of a maestro. "You have to pardon Carlo," said a colleague. "He's a little high-strung these days." With good reason. Using one of the world's most powerful atom smashers, Italy's Carlo Rubbia, 48, and his team of 134 European and American scientists appear to have snared a trophy that has been the dream of physicists for two generations: discovery of the so-called W particle, the elusive carrier of one of the universe's basic forces...
...Rubbia's announcement last week at a meeting of physicists in New York City brought instant speculation about Nobel Prizes for him and key colleagues. The detection of the W particle is an example of extraordinary scientific sleuthing, comparable to finding a missing person in a crowd of a billion people. It also provides dramatic new support for a keystone of contemporary physics: the idea that nature's fundamental operations can be united in a single mathematical framework...
...figured that they would get just one boson in a billion collisions. It would also be extremely shortlived, vanishing in less than a billionth of a billionth of a second.) When the CERN machine went back on line last fall, reaching energies of more than 540 billion electron volts, Rubbia's team identified at least five collisions that indicated the presence of both W+s and W¯s. They did not, however, find...
Brandenburg called Rubbia "exciting and audacious," adding that his willingness to follow-up on his own ideas led him to the W particle. "He's the fastest moving man around," Brandenburg said. "When Cairo is around there's never a dull moment...