Carlo Rubbia Research Articles

Panel discussion on the future of particle physics chaired by Carlo Rubbia - (ENEA and formerly CERN)

Panel discussion on the future of particle physics chaired by Carlo Rubbia - (ENEA and formerly CERN)

Scientometric analysis of synchronous references in the Physics Nobel lectures, 1981-1985: A pilot study

Scientometric analysis of synchronous references in the nine Physics Nobel lectures by Nicolaas Bloembergen (1981), Arthur L. Schawlow (1981), Kai M. Siegbahn (1981), Kenneth G. Wilson (1982), Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar (1983), William A. Fowler (1983), Carlo Rubbia (1984), Simon van der Meer (1984), and Klaus von Klitzing (1985) indicated high variations: No. of Synchronous References ranged from 24 (Meer) to 283 (Siegbahn); Synchronous Self-References ranged from 5 (Rubbia) to 88 (Siegbahn); synchronous references to others ranged from 10 (Chandrasekhar) to 255 (Wilson); Synchronous Self-Reference Rates ranged from 6.66% (Rubbia) to 65.51% (Chandrasekhar); Single-Authored References ranged from 15 (Klitzing) to 160 (Wilson); Multi-Authored References ranged from 4 (Chandrasekhar) to 194 (Siegbahn); Collaboration Coefficient in the synchronous references ranged from 0.14 (Chandrasekhar) to 0.75 (Klitzing); and Recency (age of 50% of the latest references) ranged from 2 (Klitzing) to 18 (Chandrasekhar) years. Seventy five per cent of the references belonged to journal articles. Highly referred journals wereAstrophysical Journal, Physical Review B,Physical Review Letters, Arkiv Fuer Fysik,Surface Science,Physics Letters, and IEEE Transactions on Nuclear Science.

An accelerator-driven system for the destruction of nuclear waste

Progress in particle accelerator technology makes it possible to use a proton accelerator to produce energy and to destroy nuclear waste efficiently. The energy amplifier (EA) proposed by Carlo Rubbia and his group is a subcritical fast neutron system driven by a proton accelerator. It is particularly attractive for destroying, through fission, transuranic elements produced by presently operating nuclear reactors. The EA could also efficiently and at minimal cost transform long-lived fission fragments using the concept of adiabatic resonance crossing (ARC), recently tested at CERN with the TARC experiment. The ARC concept can be extended to several other domains of application (production of radioactive isotopes for medicine and industry, neutron research applications, etc.).

The W boson weighs in

“They look like W's, they feel like W's, they smell like W's, they must be W's!” So Carlo Rubbia is said to have remarked as he pondered evidence for the existence of the W boson in January 1983. The discovery, made by the rival UA1 and UA2 experiments at CERN's Super Proton Synchrotron (SPS), was a historic moment in particle physics – with Rubbia and the UA1 collaboration narrowly beating the UA2 experiment to the prize (see “Carlo Rubbia and the discovery of the W and the Z” on pages 23–28). The discovery of the Z boson followed hot on the heels of the W in June and together they put the Standard Model of particle physics on a solid footing.

Carlo Rubbia and the discovery of the W and the Z

One summer night in 1982, about a month before the Super Proton Synchrotron (SPS) at CERN was due to start colliding beams again, the Italian particle physicist Carlo Rubbia was pacing up and down. He had a newspaper in his hand, and he was waving it around and raving at a colleague. The newspaper was French and the article that had upset him was about the forthcoming experimental run at the SPS. Not surprisingly the article described the two experiments at the collider – called UA1 and UA2 – from a French point of view.

The Pb–Bi cooled XADS status of development

In 1998, the research ministers of France, Italy and Spain have decided to set up a group of advisors for the definition of a common R&D European platform on accelerator driven systems (ADS). The advisors in turn, have established a Technical Working Group (TWG), chaired by Professor Carlo Rubbia, and now extended to the most part of the European Union member countries, in order to identify the critical technical issues for which R&D is needed. The recommendations of the TWG, included in the recently issued document `A European roadmap for developing ADS for nuclear waste incineration' [April 2001] clearly indicate the need to design and operate, approximately in 12–15 years, an XADS at a sufficiently large scale to assess the feasibility of an industrial ADS for transmutation of nuclear waste. The European Community, through the 5th Framework Program, has launched a large program on partitioning and transmutation. This program which includes R&D and preliminary design will constitute a reference for the choice of the technical solutions to be pursued forward during the 6th Framework Program. In Italy, since early 1998, the ENEA (National Research Organization for Innovative Energy), INFN (National Institute for Nuclear Physics), CRS4 (Research Institute) and Ansaldo have set up a team, led by Ansaldo, to design an 80 MWth XADS. The results obtained so far allow a consistent XADS configuration to be outlined. The main issues investigated and the associated solutions adopted are concisely described in the paper.

An accelerator-driven system for the destruction of nuclear waste

Progress in particle accelerator technology makes it possible to use a proton accelerator to produce energy and to destroy nuclear waste efficiently. The Energy Amplifier (EA) proposed by Carlo Rubbia and his group is a subcritical fast neutron system driven by a proton accelerator. It is particularly attractive for destroying, through fission, transuranic elements produced by present nuclear reactors. The EA could also transform efficiently and at minimal cost long-lived fission fragments using the concept of Adiabatic Resonance Crossing (ARC) recently tested at CERN with the TARC experiment. The ARC concept can be extended to several other domains of application (production of radioactive isotopes for medicine and industry, neutron research applications, etc.).

DATA REDUCTION TECHNIQUES AND EXTRACTION OF PHYSICS PARAMETERS IN THE ICARUS DETECTOR

A liquid argon time projection chamber (LAr-TPC) working as an electronic bubblechamber, continually sensitive, self-triggering, able to provide 3-D imaging of any ionizing event together with a good calorimetric response was first proposed by Carlo Rubbia in 1977. In order to verify the feasibility of such a detector, the ICARUS collaboration started in 1985 an intensive R&D program aiming to solve the main technological problems. The satisfactory results obtained on small scale tests allowed us to start in 1989 the construction of a 3 ton prototype which is presently working at CERN under stable conditions without interruptions since May 1991, collecting events from cosmic rays and monochromatic gamma ray sources. The paper describes the working principles of such a detector, showing the results of the research program applied in the present prototype. Some emphasis is put into the description of the read-out apparatus, a custom designed VME-based multichannel waveform recorder. The huge number of channels and the high sampling rate essential to achieve the high resolution in the track detection make the data acquisition architecture a crucial point for event detection rate and self-triggering capabilities. At present a. complete signal analysis is performed to define those parameters needed to tune up algorithms and filtering methods that will become necessary in the future step of the ICARUS detector (hundred to thousands of tons of argon, i. e. tens of thousands of readout channels). A particular effort is made to optimize track localization algorithms, in order to achieve high efficiency data reduction by storing only those portions of signal which contain the track (thus lowering up to three orders of magnitude the event size) . From a human interface point of view, the data presentation relies on an event imaging very similar to the old fashioned bubble chambers. Besides from giving a direct feeling of what happens inside the detector, this kind of representations opens a way to the wide panorama of image processing applications: tasks as detail enhancement, pattern recognition or 3D reconstruction will helpfully inherit support from more general procedures.

Hybrid nuclear systems for energy production and waste management

Abstract Carlo Rubbia (1) recently made the headlines by proposing to use hybrid systems to produce energy. A hybrid system associates a high intensity proton or deuteron accelerator to a neutron multiplier assembly. Such systems might have a number of advantages when compared to standard reactors. If correctly designed, they would make critical accidents, such as that of Tchernobyl, impossible. However, it is true that loss of cooling accidents such as that of Three Mile Island might still be possible, unless we resort to systems with natural convection cooling properties, such as those with molten salt fuels or liquid metal coolants. The number of neutrons available for breeding or waste transmutation is larger in hybrid systems than in reactors. Systems based on the Thorium-Uranium cycle, be they hybrids or traditional, would produce much less Plutonium and higher actinides than those based on the usual Uranium-Plutonium cycle. The interest in hybrid systems based on the Thoriud-Uranium cycle originate...

High Energy Physics: Particle physics review

Particle physics was at centre stage when quarks and leptons were the subject of a discussion meeting held at the Royal Society on 14 June, the day after the Bakerian lecture was delivered by Professor Carlo Rubbia. The meeting was intended to be a largely nontechnical but up to date summary of the modern view of particle physics as the physics of quarks and leptons interacting via forces carried by gauge bosons.

Experimental observation of the intermediate vector bosonsW+,W−, andZ0

The nobel price lecture of Carlo Rubbia is reprinted. The author recounts the identification of the intermediate vector bosons from the collisions of proton and antiproton beams at CERN.(AIP)

Nobel Prize to Rubbia and van der Meer for Finding W and Z

Carlo Rubbia and Simon van der Meer of CERN share the 1984 Nobel prize in physics for “their decisive contributions to the large project which led to the discovery of the field particles W and Z, communicators of weak interaction.” In 1976 Rubbia and his collaborators had the idea of converting the Super Proton Synchrotron at CERN into a proton-antiproton collider, where the W and Z particles could be created. In 1968 van der Meer had invented the method of stochastic cooling, which allowed the dense packing and storage of enough antiprotons to make the W and Z in pp̄ collisions. The CERN pp̄ collider project, the largest ever to appear in the context of the Nobel prize, yielded its first collisions in 1981. Two year later, in 1983, both the W and Z were observed by the UA1 detector group led by Rubbia and by the UA2 detector group. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, in announcing the award, said, “Two persons in the CERN project are outstanding—Carlo Rubbia, who had and developed the idea, and Simon van der Meer, whose invention made it feasible.” This year's prize, which is worth about $193 000, is the first to honor work done at CERN.

Surprising proton–proton data from CERN

Although the CERN Intersecting Storage Rings have barely been turned on, exciting experimental data are already pouring out. Carlo Rubbia (Harvard) reported, first at the Washington APS meeting and more recently, with additional data, at the Amsterdam International Conference on Elementary Particles on 2 July, surprising results from elastic proton–proton scattering. The experiment was done by a collaboration from Aachen, CERN, Harvard, Genoa and Torino. They measured the scattering for center‐of‐mass energies of 30.4, 45.0 and, more recently at 56 GeV (which is equivalent to performing a conventional high‐energy scattering experiment at about 1400 GeV). Their determination of the slope parameter is in complete contradiction with the predictions of a naive formulation of Regge theory.