Bruno Touschek

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Bruno Touschek (born February 3, 1921 in Vienna ; † March 25, 1978 in Innsbruck ) was an Austrian physicist who was a pioneer in particle accelerator physics .

Touschek attended the Piarist grammar school in Vienna until 1937, but was then excluded from teaching because of his Jewish mother and completed his Abitur as an "external" at the Schotten grammar school in Vienna. He was also excluded from the subsequent physics and mathematics studies in Vienna (he actually wanted to study in England, but did not get a visa) shortly after the start in June 1940, but initially continued to study in Hamburg (with the help of Arnold Sommerfeld , among others ), where nobody had his Knew past. He also worked on the side in the "Study Society for Electronic Devices" from Philips , which developed traveling wave tubes , the forerunner of the klystron . In 1943 he began working with Rolf Wideröe to develop a betatron . At the beginning of 1945 Touschek was arrested by the Gestapo, but also continued to work with Wideröe in prison, where he developed the theory of the radiation attenuation of electrons in betatrons. Shortly before the end of the war, the prisoners had to go on a “ death march ” to a concentration camp near Kiel , during which the feverish Touschek collapsed on the way and was left lying dead by the SS with a head shot wound. He was taken to a hospital, but was arrested again there and lived to see the end of the war in Altona prison . In 1946 he made his physics diploma at the University of Göttingen and then initially worked at the Max Planck Institute for Physics there. In 1947 he went to Glasgow on a scholarship , where he was a lecturer for theoretical physics ("Natural Philosophy"). In 1952 he went to Rome , where he became a scientist at the Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare (INFN) in Frascati . In addition, he taught from 1953 at the University of “La Sapienza” in Rome (and later also in Pisa ), where he did not receive a full professorship until 1978, the year he died. Touschek was appointed "Senior Visiting Scientist" at CERN in autumn 1977 . He spent a few months there before returning to Austria because of his illness . He died in Innsbruck after a long illness.

Touschek is best known for his work in accelerator physics. In a lecture in March 1960 in Frascati, for example, he developed the idea of ​​accelerators in which electrons and positrons (or other particle-antiparticle pairs) are accelerated separately and then brought to a collision, whereby they destroy each other. The resulting new particles / antiparticles are then studied. That was the original idea for the particle accelerators ( storage rings , colliders) used predominantly today in high-energy physics such as at DESY or CERN (e.g. LEP ), with whose discoveries the standard model of elementary particles was established (and which today provide information about the physics beyond should deliver even higher energies). Wideröe had the idea as early as 1943, but in Touschek's version the same ring could be used for particles and antiparticles that rotate in the opposite direction. Touschek also supervised the construction (with the participation of Carlo Bernardini et al.) Of the first such electron-positron storage ring in Frascati ADA (Anello di Accumulazione), named after Touschek's aunt, who lived in Albano. ADA was then transferred to Orsay , where the ACO storage ring was built as the successor, and the successor ADONE was established in Frascati from 1965 onwards. The idea was also developed independently by Gersch Izkowitsch Budker in Russia.

Touschek worked both experimentally and theoretically. He was one of the first to suggest the chiral symmetry of the strong interaction . Touschek received the Matteucci Medal in 1975 . The Liceo Scientifico in Grottaferrata is named after him.

He had been married to Elspeth Yonge, Scotland, since 1955, with whom he had two sons.

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swell

  1. ↑ a b Wolfgang Reiter: 1938 and the consequences for the natural sciences. In: Ludwig Stadler: Displaced reason. P. 672
  2. ^ Edoardo Amaldi : The Bruno Touschek Legacy (Vienna 1921 - Innsbruck 1978) . tape 81-19 . CERN Yellow Report, December 23, 1981 ( cern.ch [PDF; accessed July 30, 2019]).
personal data
SURNAME Touschek, Bruno
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Austrian physicist
DATE OF BIRTH February 3, 1921
PLACE OF BIRTH Vienna
DATE OF DEATH March 25, 1978
Place of death innsbruck