This open access book celebrates the contribution of Bruno Touschek to theoretical physics and particle colliders in Europe. It contains direct testimonials from his former students, collaborators, and eminent scientists, among them, two Nobel Prize winners in Physics, Giorgio Parisi and Carlo Rubbia. It reviews the main developments in theoretical and accelerator physics in the second half of the twentieth century, while at the same time providing an overview of future prospects worldwide. This book is unique in that it will be of interest to historians of physics and also to the younger generation of researchers. Through the contribution of the leading protagonists, the interested scholar will learn about the past, present status, and relevance of both theoretical and experimental accelerator physics. The overview of Bruno Touschek’s life and works across Europe, from pre-war Vienna to Germany, the UK, Italy, and France, adds a human dimension to the scientific narration, while the open access status makes this laudatory book available to anyone with interest.
Luisa Bonolis is a Research Scholar at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin. Her work focuses on the development of physical and astrophysical sciences in the twentieth century. She has led several oral history projects and has widely published on topics ranging from the evolution of cosmic-ray studies, of nuclear and particle physics, to the emergence of astroparticle physics and relativistic astrophysics. These subjects are also extensively covered in her most recent book (co-author: Juan Andres Leon) Astrophysics, Astronomy and Space Sciences in the History of the Max Planck Society, Leiden, Brill (in print).
Luciano Maiani, Emeritus Professor at Università di Roma La Sapienza, is author or coauthor of over 200 scientific publications, three books on Elementary Particle Theory (Francis &Taylor) and one on Multiquark Hadrons (Cambridge University Press). With S. L. Glashow and J. Iliopoulos, has predicted the existence of charmed particles as a crucial step towards the formulation of a unified theory of the Electroweak Interactions. Charmed particles have been discovered in 1976 with properties close to those anticipated in the original GIM paper. Socio of Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, of the Russian Academy of Sciences and Fellow of the American Physical Society, Maiani works at present in the theory of the recently discovered Exotic Hadrons, described as compact multiquark states.
Giulia Pancheri joined Bruno Touschek’s group at Frascati National Laboratories in 1966, and worked with him on infrared radiative corrections to electron-positron experiments at ADONE. An active particle physicist in high energy phenomenology, she has been INFN research director in Frascati and coordinator of three EU networks on physics at the Frascati electron-positron collider DAFNE, founding in 1996 the Bruno Touschek Spring School for young researchers. After retirement in 2008, she continued research on models for the total cross section and the role of soft gluon resummation in hadronic processes, while focusing on highlighting Bruno Touschek’s scientific accomplishments in the wider context of the birth of collider physics. She is the author of the book "Bruno Touschek’s Extraordinary Journey, from death-rays to antimatter", Springer Biographies, 2022. A Fellow of the American Physical Society since 2009, she lives in Rome and is a senior scientist affiliated to the Frascati Laboratories.
