Carlo Rubbia was born in Italy and carried out his first serious scientific experiments as a young boy, using communication equipment abandoned at the end of World War II. Since his postdoctoral year at Columbia University in 1958 and 1959, Rubbia has been particularly interested in the study of elementary particles, and through his affiliations with the European Center for Nuclear Research (CERN) he has had some of the most powerful particle accelerators in the world available for his research. Since the late 1960s, Rubbia's primary research has involved the search for a trio of particles known as the W+, W-, and Z0 bosons, which were postulated in the 1960s as the force particles through which the electroweak force exerts its influence. By 1982, Rubbia and his colleagues at CERN had designed the equipment needed to carry out this search and had successfully located the first W particles. For this accomplishment, he and co-worker Simon van der Meer were awarded the 1984 Nobel Prize in physics.
Rubbia was born on March 31, 1934, in the small town of Gorizia, in northern Italy. His father was Silvio R. Rubbia, a telephone worker; his mother, Bice Liceni Rubbia, was a school teacher. When World War II ended in 1945, 11-year-old Carlo "scaveng[ed] radio equipment that had been abandoned as various armies marched through on their various advances and retreats," according to Gary Taubes in his book Nobel Dreams. He used this equipment to learn everything about radios, becoming something of an "electronics freak," Taubes wrote.
Studies Elementary Particles in Italy and the United States
In 1945, Silvio Rubbia's job brought the family to Pisa, where Rubbia was enrolled at the prestigious Scuola Normale Superiore, a rigorous secondary school affiliated with the University of Pisa. After graduating from the Scuola, Rubbia went on to the university, earning a Ph.D. in physics in 1958 for his dissertation on cosmic radiation and particle detection devices. During the academic year 1958-59, Rubbia continued his studies at Columbia University in the United States, where he worked with some of the world's outstanding physicists, including Tsung-Dao Lee , Chen Ning Yang , Chien-Shiung Wu, Charles H. Townes , Melvin Schwartz , Leon Ledeberg, and Steven Weinberg, acquiring from them an interest in weak-interaction physics.
Rubbia returned to Italy in 1960 to continue his post-doctoral studies at the University of Rome. A year later, he accepted an appointment at CERN in Geneva. A consortium of more than a dozen European nations, CERN is one of the world's most important centers for the study of elementary particles. Rubbia quickly moved up the hierarchy at CERN and was appointed to the prestigious position of team leader before he was 30 years old.
Rubbia's goal during his first years at CERN was the discovery of three "intermediate vector bosons" known as the W+, W-, and Z0 particles. The existence of these particles had been predicted in the 1960s, when Sheldon Glashow , Abdus Salam, and Steven Weinberg had independently developed an electroweak theory proposing that two fundamental forces, the electromagnetic and weak forces, are manifestations of a more fundamental natural force, and predicting the existence of W and Z particles. In 1971, Salam and Weinberg suggested that the neutral Z particle could be detected in "neutral currents" that would be produced by the collision of neutrinos and matter. Rubbia's objective was to design and conduct the experiment that would, for the first time, produce this particle.
Improved Accelerator Design Leads to Discovery of W and Z Particles
In 1969, Rubbia joined a project at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) near Chicago to search for the W particles. In 1971, however, the team switched their efforts to the attempt to prove the existence of neutral weak currents, thus putting them in direct competition with Rubbia's former colleagues at CERN. In 1973, the CERN team published nearly conclusive evidence that neutral weak currents existed. The Fermilab team immediately rushed to publish their own as yet incomplete results, which also supported the existence of the currents. At about the same time, Rubbia's visa expired and he returned to Euope. Soon thereafter, the Fermi team reconducted their experiments and announced that their original findings had been in error. They then realized, however, that this second set of experiments was flawed, and they retracted their earlier retraction. The confusion temporarily tarnished Rubbia's reputation.
Both teams now turned their attention to the search for the W and Z particles. However, no existing particle accelerator could generate the energy needed to produce them. Rubbia proposed a revolutionary new technique in which two particle beams, one composed of protons and one of antiprotons, would be set in motion in opposite directions and caused to collide with each other. The amount of energy released in such a collision, Rubbia said, should be sufficient to result in the formation of W and Z particles. Rubbia's idea was ridiculed by a number of physicists, including the director of Fermilab. Managers at CERN were more open-minded, however, and provided the $100 million needed to redesign the center's super proton synchrotron to Rubbia's specifications.
By 1982, that work had been completed and the search for the W+, W-, and Z bosons began. Within a month's time, the first W particles had been identified and, less than a year later, the first Z's were also discovered. For this accomplishment, Rubbia shared the 1984 Nobel Prize in physics with the Dutch scientist Simon van der Meer, who had devised a means of storing and regulating the erratic antiprotons.
Rubbia has been affiliated with Harvard University since 1970 (1972 according to some biographers), teaching one semester there each year. He has also continued an active program of research at CERN. Rubbia married Marissa Romé, a high school physics teacher, on June 27, 1960. They have two daughters, Laura and Andrea. Rubbia has been described as one of the most controversial figures in modern particle physics, a man driven by his love for science and, according to some, his own ego. His reputation at CERN, for example, has been described by Taubes as "very, very good and very, very bad," and an article in the October 25, 1984, issue of New Scientist called him "an ebullient yet irascible Italian whom fellow physicists love to hate."
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