No Arabic abstract
In the history of the discovery tools of last century particle physics, central stage is taken by elementary particle accelerators and in particular by colliders. In their start and early development, a major role was played by the Austrian born Bruno Touschek, who proposed and built the first electron positron collider, AdA, in Italy, in 1960. In this note, we present a period of Touscheks life barely explored in the literature, namely the five years he spent at University of Glasgow, first to obtain his doctorate in 1949 and then as a lecturer. We shall highlight his formation as a theoretical physicist, his contacts and correspondence with Werner Heisenberg in Gottingen and Max Born in Edinburgh, as well as his close involvement with colleagues intent on building modern particle accelerators in Glasgow, Malvern, Manchester and Birmingham. We shall discuss how the Fuchs affair, which unraveled in early 1950, may have influenced his decision to leave the UK, and how contacts with the Italian physicist Bruno Ferretti led Touschek to join the Guglielmo Marconi Physics Institute of University of Rome in January 1953.
Bruno Touschek was an Austrian born theoretical physicist, who proposed and built the first electron-positron collider in 1960 in the Frascati National Laboratories in Italy. In this note we reconstruct a crucial period of Bruno Touscheks life so far scarcely explored, which runs from Summer 1945 to the end of 1946. We shall describe his university studies in Gottingen, placing them in the context of the reconstruction of German science after 1945. The influence of Werner Heisenberg and other prominent German physicists will be highlighted. In parallel, we shall show how the decisions of the Allied powers towards restructuring science and technology in the UK after the war effort, determined Touscheks move to the University of Glasgow in 1947.
We describe how the first direct observation of electron-positron collisions took place in 1963-1964 at the Laboratoire de lAccelerateur Lineaire dOrsay, in France, with the storage ring AdA, which had been proposed and constructed in the Italian National Laboratories of Frascati in 1960, under the guidance of Bruno Touschek. The obstacles and successes of the two and a half years during which the feasibility of electron-positron colliders was proved will be illustrated using archival and forgotten documents, in addition to transcripts from interviews with Carlo Bernardini, Peppino Di Giugno, Mario Fascetti, Francois Lacoste, and Jacques Haissinski.
With this note, we remember our friend Maria Krawczyk, who passed away this year, on May 24th. We briefly outline some of her physics interests and main accomplishments, and her great human and moral qualities.
We review the literature on possible violations of the superposition principle for electromagnetic fields in vacuum from the earliest studies until the emergence of renormalized QED at the end of the 1940s. The exposition covers experimental work on photon-photon scattering and the propagation of light in external electromagnetic fields and relevant theoretical work on nonlinear electrodynamic theories (Born-Infeld theory and QED) until the year 1949. To enrich the picture, pieces of reminiscences from a number of (theoretical) physicists on their work in this field are collected and included or appended.
Studies Beyond the Standard Model (BSM) will become more and more important in the near future with a rapidly increasing amount of data from different experiments around the world. The full study of BSM models is in general an extremely time-consuming task involving long and difficult calculations. It is in practice not possible to do exhaustive predictions in these models by hand, in particular if one wants to perform a statistical comparison with data and the SM. Here we present MARTY (Modern ARtificial Theoretical phYsicist), a new C++ framework that fully automates calculations from the Lagrangian to physical quantities such as amplitudes or cross-sections. This framework can fully simplify, automatically and symbolically, physical quantities in a very large variety of models. MARTY can also compute Wilson coefficients in effective theories. This will considerably facilitate the study of BSM models in flavor physics. Contrary to the existing public codes in this field MARTY aims to give a unique, free, open-source, powerful and user-friendly tool for high-energy physicists studying predictive BSM models, in effective or full theories up to the 1-loop level, which does not rely on any external package. With a few lines of code one can gather final expressions that may be evaluated numerically for statistical analysis. Features like automatic generation and manual edition of Feynman diagrams, comprehensive manual and documentation, clear and easy to handle user interface are amongst notable features of MARTY.