Bruno Touschek was an Austrian-born theoretical physicist who proposed what became the world’s first circular particle collider. But as Giulia Pancheri describes, few colleagues were aware of a dark past, which saw him work on a “death-ray” device for the Nazi military One sunny day in May 1966, I entered the grounds of the National Laboratory of Frascati (LNF) near Rome for the first time. I had just graduated with a degree in physics from the University of Rome and had a fellowship to work in Frascati’s theoretical-physics group.
It was led by Bruno Touschek, who six years earlier had famously proposed building a new kind of particle accelerator that was to become a prototype for many future devices around the world. His idea did not involve smashing particles into fixed targets or colliding electrons with each other. Instead, Touschek wanted to show you could store enough antimatter in the form of positrons and collide them head-on with electrons in a circular device, with the resulting annihilation revealing new secrets of the particle world.
His dream became reality in 1963 when the Anello di Accumulazione (AdA), or “storage ring”, came online. AdA was such an extraordinary accomplishment that similar electron–positron colliders were soon built elsewhere too. Now, in 1966, Touschek was overseeing construction of ADONE – an even more powerful and beautiful machine – that would collide electrons and positrons with a centre-of-mass energy higher than any o.
