The LHC timeline: a personal recollection (1980–2012)

Abstract

Abstract. The objective of this interview is to study the history of the Large Hadron Collider in the LEP tunnel at CERN, from first ideas to the discovery of the Brout-Englert-Higgs boson, seen from the point of view of a member of CERN scientific committees, of the CERN Council and a former Director General of CERN in the years of machine construction.1 The SppS collider and LEP L. B. During the 1980s, at the time when LEP, the Large Electron Positron collider, was being completed, you began to be deeply involved with CERN. . . 1 L. M. Nicola Cabibbo had been in the Scientific Policy Committee (SPC) in the 1970s, when they had advised CERN to approve the construction of the protonantiproton collider proposed by Carlo Rubbia and Simon van der Meer to search for the Intermediate Vector Bosons. It was a difficult machine and the positive recommendation of the SPC was a far-sighted decision.The pp-project of Rubbia, initiated in 1976, was based on the conclusion that with the unified theory of the electroweak interactions (Glashow, 1961;Weinberg, 1967;Salam, 1968) and the measurement of sin 2θ from Gargamelle, the predicted mass of the charged intermediate vector boson W was around 70 GeV, requiring a proton-antiproton collider to reach such energies. However, at FermiLab, Bob Wilson was not interested in the project. Rubbia, after strong opposition, convinced finally Léon van Hove and John Adams of a pp collider, at the CERN SPS, based on the Stochastic Cooling project of Simon van der Meer.The SppS started operation in 1981, after only 5 years of construction. An immediate outcome was the appearance of narrow jets even in a hadron machineThe text presented here has been revised by the authors based on the original oral history interview conducted by Luisa Bonolis and recorded in Rome, Italy, 1-3 March 2016. a e-mail: lbonolis@mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de 1 We are indebted to Prof. Dieter Haidt for very informative exchange on the arguments discussed in this section.

Accelerating Basic Science in an Intergovernmental Framework: Learning from CERN's Science Diplomacy

“…Bona stressed that membership of the SPC is decided on the basis of scientific competency and emphasised that committee proposals are often accepted by the Council because this institutional arrangement, i.e., merit‐based appointments that are not limited to member states, allows for a focus on the scientific objective above and beyond particular objectives of member states (Bona, interview 10 November 2016). Having said that, past debates and decisions about new large‐scale projects at CERN such as the commitment to the LHC, reveal a complex web of relations between science and politics and negotiations that go back and forth between political and scientific aims (Maiani and Bonolis, ). However, it can even be argued that this particular governance structure ‘ultimately helps maintain control of a project within the hands of the scientists involved’ (Riordan et al., , p. 291).…”

“…In the context of large‐scale projects at CERN such as the Large Electron‐Positron (LEP) collider and the LHC, member states raised severe doubts about their ability to contribute financially. In the case of the LHC, for example, a number of compromises on the design and scale of the project were crucial for eventually reaching an agreement (Maiani and Bonolis, ).…”

Bruno Touschek and AdA: From Frascati to Orsay

“…6 B. Touschek, "A brief outline of the story of AdA", excerpts from a talk delivered by Touschek at the Accademia dei Lincei on May 24, 1974 (manuscript, Bruno Touschek Archive, Box 11, Folder 92.5, pp. 5-6 9 This maximum energy for the annihilating electrons and positrons doomed Frascati not to be able to discover the charm-anticharm bound state, the J/Ψ, for which one needed to reach more than of 3.1 GeV in the center of mass (Maiani and Bonolis 2017). Once the discovery was announced (Aubert et al 1974, Augustin et al 1974, the Frascati experimentalists forced ADONE to reach the higher energy value required to observe the new particle, but could only confirm the discovery (Bacci et al 1974), whose credit went to the two American groups, led by Samuel Ting and Burton Richter, respectively.…”

Bruno Touschek and AdA: from Frascati to Orsay. In memory of Bruno Touschek, who passed away 40 years ago, on May 25th, 1978

“…9 This maximum energy for the annihilating electrons and positrons doomed Frascati not to be able to discover the charm-anticharm bound state, the J/Ψ, for which one needed to reach more than of 3.1 GeV in the center of mass (Maiani and Bonolis 2017). Once the discovery was announced (Aubert et al The enthusiasm was high in Frascati, when, in February 1961, the magnet was turned on and, less than a year after the official seminar where Bruno Touschek had presented his proposal, the little ring started functioning: electrons and positrons could be proven to circulate in the doughnut by observing the light signal they emitted, the phenomenon also known as synchrotron light radiation.…”