Abstract
Despite some gender-related bumps in the road, the author had the good fortune that her career spanned the evolution of the Standard Model from its inception in the late 1960s and early 1970s to its final confirmation with the discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012. Her major contributions to these developments and other facets of her career are described.
Highlights
As it happened, Bernard d’Espagnat, a professor from the Paris theory group, was visiting CERN the year I arrived, and he agreed to take me on as his doctoral student
Wojcicki presented the results [6] of his group, which, analyzed in terms of these functions, gave beautiful agreement with the theory. The verification of this and other predictions of approximate chiral symmetry confirmed that, up to quark mass effects, interactions among quarks left their helicity unchanged, which in turn implied that these interactions were mediated by spin 1 particle exchange, like quantum electrodynamics (QED)
In contrast to QED, the strong coupling among quarks is asymptotically free, which means that the coupling strength decreases with increasing energy and decreasing distance, a feature demonstrated first in electron–proton scattering experiments [7] at SLAC, and in neutrino–nucleon scattering [8] in the Gargamelle bubble chamber at CERN
Summary
Bernard d’Espagnat, a professor from the Paris theory group, was visiting CERN the year I arrived, and he agreed to take me on as his doctoral student. Wojcicki presented the results [6] of his group, which, analyzed in terms of these functions, gave beautiful agreement with the theory The verification of this and other predictions of approximate chiral symmetry confirmed that, up to quark mass effects, interactions among quarks left their helicity unchanged, which in turn implied that these interactions were mediated by spin 1 particle exchange, like quantum electrodynamics (QED). When Ben and I were discussing the situation, I asked, “If the GIM mechanism is correct, why isn’t the decay K → 2γ suppressed?” In contrast to K → 2μ, for example, the two-photon decay proceeds at the normal weak interaction rate, whereas, like other strangeness-changing neutral current processes, it would be forbidden by the GIM mechanism in the limit of equal up and charm quark masses. I arrived at the conference in a state of shock and sadness, but my Russian friends did their best to cheer me up
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
