Remembering MILLA & those times Early years – late

Transcript:Remembering MILLA & those times Early years – late:
Remembering MILLA & those times Early years – late 1950’s J.Schneps, Neutrino Telescopes 2013 1 I arrived in Padova with an NSF Fellowship September 1, 1958. Why would a young U.S. physicist (2 years from the Ph.D.) come to Padova? For this we have to travel 7500 km and a few years back from Padova to Madison, Wisconsin. 1952 – W.F. (Jack) Fry arrives at Univ of Wisconsin to start an experimental program in particle physics using nuclear emulsions. 1953 – He receives a grant from the Atomic Energy Commission and I become his first student, shortly after joined by M.S. Swami from India and a year later by postdoc George Snow. 2 The exciting thing at the time was “strange” particles. K-mesons, the θ-τ puzzle, Λ, Σ, Ξ hyperons, associated production, and Gell Mann’s new strangeness quantum number. We flew emulsion stacks in balloons to get high energy cosmic ray events, and exposed stacks to kaon beams at the new proton accelerators, the 2-3 GeV Cosmotron and the 6.3 GeV Bevatron. The K– beams from the Bevatron were prolific producers of strange particles. We produced about 5 papers/year – a paper had 3-4 authors and 1 – 1001 events. Here are a couple I especially remember. 3 One event paper An Ω- event 6 years before the Ω- was predicted, 8 years before discovered. M=1672.1±1.0 MeV (L.Alvarez-1973) 4 First evidence of K0-K0 mixing Published simultaneosly with Lande et.al. in Phys.Rev., Sept. 1956 5 1956 Fry takes me aside – he has good news to tell me He’s been promoted - Assoc.Prof. with tenure. He has a Guggenheim Fellowship and will go to Padova in September for a year. I can stay in Wisconsin as a postdoc or find another job. I choose to go to Tufts Univ. in Boston as Ass’t. Prof. It’s my job to finish up the papers we’ve been working on. Jack is excited about long-lived K0. Before leaving he exposes a stack of emulsion to a K– beam at the Bevatron and takes it with him to Padova. 6 1956-57 I would write to Fry with physics questions about the papers we were finishing. He would answer with a three page letter. One sentence about the physics questions - and three pages about how wonderful Italy was; Padova, Venezia, the Istituto di Fisica, and especially the people he was working with : Above all, this