Bruno Touschek

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 at 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 Philips, where "drift tubes"—the forerunners of the klystron—were being developed at that time. In 1943, he asked Rolf Widerøe to cooperate with him in building a betatron, critically studying an article of Donald Kerst. In the following, Touschek, Widerøe, R. Kollath and G. Schumann worked on a 15 MeV betatron, which was constructed near Hamburg and was operational in 1944. the daughter of the eminent Scottish zoologist Charles Maurice Yonge. A son, Francis, was born in 1958, and a brother, Steven, followed in 1961.

On 7 March 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) at CERN. The first electron-positron storage ring, called Anello Di Accumulazione (ADA), was constructed in Frascati under Touschek's supervision in the early sixties. During the next decade more electron-positron rings followed and their outcomes changed completely some of the physics community perceptions of the world. One of the transitions, the elementary hadrons had then turned into composite particles. Even though ADA has been turned off a long time ago, the laboratory is active and contributes to work in the field of electron linear accelerators. Significant collaborations are the LIL for LEP in 1986 and CLIC test facility at CERN.

Touschek died in Innsbruck in 1978.

Honours and awards Touschek was awarded the Matteucci Medal in 1975.

There is a street, Route Touschek, named after Touschek at CERN, Prévessin, France.

In the city of Grottaferrata, close to the Frascati Laboratories, since 1982, there is the unique high/secondary school in Italy named after him: Liceo Scientifico Statale - Bruno Touschek.