Bruno Touschek
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Bruno Touschek (February 3, 1921–May 25, 1978) was an Austrian physicist, a survivor of the Holocaust, and initiator of research on electron-positron colliders.
[edit] Biography
Touschek was born and attended school in Vienna. In 1937, he was not allowed to finish high school since his mother was Jewish. He passed the final year exam in a different school as an external pupil. Shortly after he started studying physics and mathematics at the University in Vienna, he again had to quit for racial reasons. Thanks to a couple of friends, he could keep on studying in Hamburg, where nobody knew of his origins. In order to make a living, he took up several jobs at the same time.
During this period, he worked at the Studiengesellschaft für Elektronengeräte, a company affiliated to Phillips, where "drift tubes" - the forerunners of the klystron - were being developed at that time. In 1943, he asked Rolf Wideröe to cooperate with him in building a betatron. When Touschek was arrested by the Gestapo in 1945, Wideroë visited him in prison, and during these meetings they continued to talk about the betatron. In particular, they conceived the idea of radiation damping for electrons circulating in a betatron.
Touschek escaped the concentration camp he was held in largely by chance. After the war, he graduated from the University of Göttingen in 1946 and began to work at the Max Planck Institute. In 1947, he left for Glasgow on a fellowship. He was subsequently appointed an Official lecturer in Natural Philosophy at the University of Glasgow, a position he kept until he left for Rome in 1952. He decided to stay in Rome permanently, receiving the position of researcher at the National laboratories of the Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare in Frascati, near Rome. He was also appointed as a part-time lecturer at the University of Rome-La Sapienza, where he eventually became a full professor in 1978. He did, however, return to Glasgow briefly in 1955 where he married artist Elspeth Yonge, the daughter of an eminent Scottish zoologist. A son, Francis, was born in 1958 and brother Steven followed in 1961.
On March 7, 1960, Touschek gave a talk in Frascati where he proposed the idea of a collider: a particle accelerator where a particle and its antiparticle circulate the same orbit in opposite direction. When bunches of opposite-moving particles and antiparticles collide, they annihilate and produce new particles depending on the collision energy. This concept is at the base of all present-day very high energy particle accelerators, such as the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). The first electron-positron storage ring, called ADA (Anello di Accumulazione), was constructed in Frascati under Touschek's supervision in the early sixties.
Touscheck died in Innsbruck in 1978.
