Peter Kalmus

Peter Ignaz Paul Kalmus (born 25 January 1933), is a British particle physicist, and emeritus professor of physics at Queen Mary, University of London.

The UA1 experiment was designed to be a general-purpose detector, aimed at investigating phenomena at high energy collisions. Data were obtained from 1981 onwards, when the CERN Super Proton Synchrotron was converted into a proton-antiproton collider, as suggested by Rubbia, using the stochastic beam cooling technique devised by Simon van der Meer. The UK groups had joint responsibility for designing, constructing and operating a large hadron calorimeter and also a trigger processor.

The most celebrated work with the UA1 detector was the discovery in 1983 of the W and Z particles. This discovery provided experimental evidence for electroweak unification: the merging of two of nature's fundamental forces, electromagnetism and the weak force. Electroweak unification demonstrated that nature's four fundamental forces (electromagnetism, weak interaction, strong interaction and gravity) could be reduced to three interactions at energy scales above the unification energy. The unification of these two forces is part of a larger quest to determine if all fundamental forces can be united into a "theory of everything" (Unified Field Theory).

For this work Carlo Rubbia and Simon van der Meer of CERN received the 1984 Nobel Prize for Physics. Alan Astbury received the 1984 Rutherford Medal and Prize, and Peter Kalmus and John Dowell were jointly awarded the 1988 Rutherford Medal and Prize from the Institute of Physics for their outstanding roles in the discovery of the W and Z particles.

His brother, George Kalmus, is another British particle physicist. A press release from the Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council (PPARC) in 2002 commented that "A particle physicist in the family is a rare occurrence. That there should be two and both be leaders of the field is even more unusual, yet Professors Peter and George Kalmus have achieved this."