Bruno Touschek and the birth of collider physics: an extraordinary journey

I will describe new findings about the Austrian born scientist Bruno Touschek, who in 1960 proposed and built in Italy the first ever electron-positron collider. A recently published biography and the Proceedings of a Memorial Symposium, held in Rome in December 2021 one hundred years after his birth in Vienna on 3 February 1921, highlight Touschek’s scientific work and the three particle accelerators he brought to success, from Rolf Wideroe’s betatron in 1944, to the e+e- colliders AdA and ADONE in the 1960’s. Touschek’s life spanned Europe in space and time, from racial discrimination, because his mother was Jewish, to the years of European reconstruction. After escaping deportation to the Kiel concentration camp in April 1945, Touschek pursued his studies in Goettingen, where he was Heisenberg’s assistant in 1946, and in Glasgow, where he was befriended by Max Born, and received his PhD, with Rudolf Peierls as external examiner. Arriving in Italy in the early 1950s, he learnt the CPT theorem from Wolfgang Pauli and envisioned its consequences in his proposal to build the world’s first matter-antimatter storage ring in Frascati, becoming one of the leading figures in the development of electron-positron colliders in the 1960’s.



Bibliography

G. Pancheri, Bruno Touschek’s extraordinary journey. Springer Biographies, Springer International Publishing AG, 2022, https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-031-03826-6

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