Carlo Rubbia Biography

World of Scientific Discovery on Carlo Rubbia

Nobel Prize winners typically wait a decade or two--or even more--between the time they make their award-winning discovery and the time they actually receive the Prize. The most striking exception to that general rule occurred in 1984 when Carlo Rubbia and Simon van der Meer were awarded the Prize for physics for their discovery of the W and Z bosons only a year earlier.

The Rubbia-van der Meer research had been conceived more than a decade earlier, inspired by the electroweak theory proposed by Sheldon Glashow, Abdus Salam, and Steven Weinberg. That theory explains how the electromagnetic and weak forces are both manifestations of a single fundamental force, the electroweak force. One consequence of the theory was the prediction that three new force-carrying particles, the W+, W-, and Z0 boson existed.

The technical problem was that those particles are identifiable only at very high energies, beyond those of most particle accelerator s. Rubbia had begun the search for these particles in the early 1970s, using the newly completed accelerator at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Illinois. However, the accelerator was not powerful enough to generate the missing particles.

By 1976, Rubbia had conceived of a new approach in the search for the W and Z bosons. He and his colleagues proposed the construction of an accelerator system in which proton and antiproton beams, traveling in opposite directions, could be made to collide with each other. The energy released in such a collision would be sufficient to form the sought-for particles.

When officials at Fermilab expressed doubt that such an experiment could work, Rubbia turned to the European Center for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva with his suggestion. He received a more open response there and, in a relatively short time, modifications on CERN's Super Proton Synchrotron began. By employing the technique of stochastic cooling invented by van der Meer, the once unlikely experiment became a reality, and the search for the W and Z bosons was initiated in 1983. Within a matter of months, each of the three predicted particles was found, and the electroweak theory received crucial confirmation.

Carlo Rubbia was born in Gorizia, Italy, on March 31, 1934, the son of an electrical engineer. At the age of 11, he moved to Pisa with his family where he later earned his bachelor's degree at the Scuola Normale Superiore. In 1958, he received his Ph.D. in physics from the University of Pisa. After spending two years at Columbia University, Rubbia returned to Italy as professor of physics at the University of Rome. In 1961 he also joined the research staff at CERN.

Over the last two decades, Rubbia has become involved in a number of teaching and research projects that take him around the world. Since 1976, Rubbia has divided his time between Harvard University, where he is professor of physics, and CERN, where he is now senior scientist and director of various research projects. He was also its director-general from 1989 to 1994.

In 1997 Rubbia announced that he and his CERN team had developed a nuclear reactor that could dispose of atomic waste. His current research involves his development of what he calls an "energy amplifier," a safe fission reactor that could, theoretically, make power without long-lived nuclear waste.