FIRST DESCRIPTION OF AN ATOM COLLIDER

KERST, D. W. ET AL.

Attainment of Very High Energy by Means of Intersecting Beams of Particles.

Lancaster, American Institute of Physics, 1956. 4to. Volume 102, April 15, No. 2, 1956 of "The Physical Review", Second Series. Entire volume offered in the original blue wrappers with owner´s stamps to front wrapper. A very fine and clean copy. Pp. 590-1. [Entire issue: Pp. 299-592.].

First printing of Kerst's important paper in which a proposal for a collider (Particle-Antiparticle Collider) is presented for the first time. "The beginning of the subject can be traced back to a study by Kerst and collaborators (1956). (Pais. Inward Bound, p. 574.). Colliders are today absolutely fundamental in both applied and theoretical physics.

"The real beginning of colliding beams comes in a paper by Donald Kerst et al., published as a letter to the editor in the Physical Review in early 1956 [the present paper]. Kerst was the leader of a Midwestern Universities Research Association (MURA), which was the training ground for so many of the important accelerator physicists of the 1960s and 1970s. [...] Kerst and his colleagues had recognized in the relativistic case the enormous advantage of colliding beams over the fixed-target technique in attaining very high energy." (Hoddeson. The Rise of the Standard Model, 1997, p. 263).

Order-nr.: 43850