10 research outputs found
Bruno Touschek: particle physicist and father of the electron-positron collider
This article gives a brief outline of the life and works of the Austrian
physicist Bruno Touschek, who conceived, proposed and, 50 years ago, brought to
completion the construction of AdA, the first electron-positron storage ring.
The events which led to the approval of the AdA pro ject and the Franco-Italian
collaboration which con- firmed the feasibility of electron-positron storage
rings will be recalled. We shall illustrate Bruno Touschek's formation both as
a theoretical physicist and as an expert in particle accelerators during the
period be- tween the time he had to leave the Vienna Staat Gymnasium in 1938,
because of his Jewish origin from the maternal side, until he arrived in Italy
in the early 1950s and, in 1960, proposed to build AdA, in Frascati. The events
which led to Touschek's collaboration with Rolf Wideroe in the construction of
the first European betatron will be de- scribed. The article will make use of a
number of unpublished as well as previously unknown documents, which include an
early correspon- dence with Arnold Sommerfeld and Bruno Touschek's letters to
his family in Vienna from Italy, Germany and Great Britain. The impact of
Touschek's work on students and collaborators from University of Rome will be
illustrated through his work on QED infrared radiative corrections to high
energy e+e- experiments and the book Meccanica Statistica.Comment: To be published in EPJ
Stellar structure and compact objects before 1940: Towards relativistic astrophysics
Since the mid-1920s, different strands of research used stars as "physics
laboratories" for investigating the nature of matter under extreme densities
and pressures, impossible to realize on Earth. To trace this process this paper
is following the evolution of the concept of a dense core in stars, which was
important both for an understanding of stellar evolution and as a testing
ground for the fast-evolving field of nuclear physics. In spite of the divide
between physicists and astrophysicists, some key actors working in the
cross-fertilized soil of overlapping but different scientific cultures
formulated models and tentative theories that gradually evolved into more
realistic and structured astrophysical objects. These investigations culminated
in the first contact with general relativity in 1939, when J. Robert
Oppenheimer and his students George Volkoff and Hartland Snyder systematically
applied the theory to the dense core of a collapsing neutron star. This
pioneering application of Einstein's theory to an astrophysical compact object
can be regarded as a milestone in the path eventually leading to the emergence
of relativistic astrophysics in the early 1960s.Comment: 83 pages, 4 figures, submitted to the European Physical Journal
Gravitational-wave research as an emerging field in the Max Planck Society. The long roots of GEO600 and of the Albert Einstein Institute
On the occasion of the 50th anniversary since the beginning of the search for
gravitational waves at the Max Planck Society, and in coincidence with the 25th
anniversary of the foundation of the Albert Einstein Institute, we explore the
interplay between the renaissance of general relativity and the advent of
relativistic astrophysics following the German early involvement in
gravitational-wave research, to the point when gravitational-wave detection
became established by the appearance of full-scale detectors and international
collaborations. On the background of the spectacular astrophysical discoveries
of the 1960s and the growing role of relativistic astrophysics, Ludwig Biermann
and his collaborators at the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics in Munich
became deeply involved in research related to such new horizons. At the end of
the 1960s, Joseph Weber's announcements claiming detection of gravitational
waves sparked the decisive entry of this group into the field, in parallel with
the appointment of the renowned relativist Juergen Ehlers. The Munich area
group of Max Planck institutes provided the fertile ground for acquiring a
leading position in the 1970s, facilitating the experimental transition from
resonant bars towards laser interferometry and its innovation at increasingly
large scales, eventually moving to a dedicated site in Hannover in the early
1990s. The Hannover group emphasized perfecting experimental systems at pilot
scales, and never developed a full-sized detector, rather joining the LIGO
Scientific Collaboration at the end of the century. In parallel, the Max Planck
Institute for Gravitational Physics (Albert Einstein Institute) had been
founded in Potsdam, and both sites, in Hannover and Potsdam, became a unified
entity in the early 2000s and were central contributors to the first detection
of gravitational waves in 2015.Comment: 94 pages. Enlarged version including new results from further
archival research. A previous version appears as a chapter in the volume The
Renaissance of General Relativity in Context, edited by A. Blum, R. Lalli and
J. Renn (Boston: Birkhauser, 2020