Département de Physique Nucléaire

In this seminar I  shall illustrate the life of Bruno Touschek, the Austrian born theoretical physicist who proposed to build and brought to completion the first particle accelerator in which matter and anti-matter, electrons and positrons, were made to collide.

Named, AdA, Anello di Accumulazione, this small accelerator was built in Italy, in Frascati, in 1960, and brought  in 1962 to France, at LAL,  where a team of Italian and French scientists and technicians,  was able to show, for the first time in the world, that the concept of such a machine would work, and could be used by future generations, becoming the  the prototype on which   bigger machines such as ACO, SPEAR, ADONE, LEP would be built. 

The seminar will recall Touschek’s early years in Vienna, where he was born in 1921, the difficulties   he met because of his Jewish origin from mother’s side, and how it happened that he   learnt the art of making particle accelerators during World War II, in Germany, with the Norwegian expert Rolf Wideroe, while building a betatron for   a classified project, financed by the Reich Aviation Ministry.

The seminar is based on both published and unpublished documents, such as letters from Touschek to his father during Wold War II. We shall also show and comment some of the remarkable drawings through which Touschek used to comment upon, and satirize, the  events surrounding him, such as the student unrest in the late ’60.