Editing Carlo Rubbia (section)

===CERN===
He moved back to Europe for a placement at the [[Sapienza University of Rome|University of Rome]] before joining the newly founded [[CERN]] in 1960, where he worked on experiments on the structure of weak interactions. CERN had just commissioned a new type of accelerator, the [[Intersecting Storage Rings]], using counter-rotating beams of [[proton]]s colliding against each other.  Rubbia and his collaborators conducted experiments there, again studying the weak force. The main results in this field were the observation of the structure in the elastic scattering process and the first observation of the [[charm quark|charmed]] baryons. These experiments were crucial in order to perfect the techniques needed later for the discovery of more exotic particles in a different type of particle collider.<ref name="Discover Cern"/><ref name="Cern Courier"/><ref name="New York Times"/>

In 1976, he suggested adapting CERN's [[Super Proton Synchrotron]] (SPS) to collide protons and antiprotons in the same ring – the [[Proton-Antiproton Collider]]. Using [[Simon van der Meer]]s technology of [[stochastic cooling]], the [[Antiproton Accumulator]] was also built. The collider started running in 1981 and, in early 1983, an international team of more than 100 physicists headed by Rubbia and known as the UA1 Collaboration, detected the intermediate vector bosons, the [[W and Z bosons]], which had become a cornerstone of modern theories of [[elementary particle physics]] long before this direct observation. They carry the weak force that causes [[radioactive decay]] in the [[atomic nucleus]] and controls the combustion of the [[Sun]], just as [[photons]], massless particles of light, carry the [[electromagnetic force]] which causes most physical and biochemical reactions. The weak force also plays a fundamental role in the [[nucleosynthesis]] of the elements, as studied in theories of stars evolution.  These particles have a mass almost 100 times greater than the proton. In 1984 Carlo Rubbia and Simon van der Meer were awarded the Nobel Prize "for their decisive contributions to the large project, which led to the discovery of the field particles W and Z, communicators of weak interaction".{{cn|date=December 2022|reason=These claims require citations}}

To achieve energies high enough to create these particles, Rubbia, together with David Cline and Peter McIntyre, proposed a radically new particle accelerator design. They proposed to use a beam of [[protons]] and a beam of [[antiproton]]s, their [[antimatter]] twins, counter-rotating in the vacuum pipe of the accelerator and colliding head-on. The idea of creating particles by colliding beams of more "ordinary" particles was not new: electron-positron and proton-proton colliders were already in use. However, by the late 1970s / early 1980s those could not approach the needed energies in the centre of mass to explore the W/Z region predicted by theory. At those energies, protons colliding with anti-protons were the best candidates, but how to obtain sufficiently intense (and well-collimated) beams of anti-protons, which are normally produced by impinging a beam of protons on a fixed target? Van den Meer had in the meantime developed the concept of "stochastic cooling", in which particles, like anti-protons, could be kept in a circular array, and their beam divergence reduced progressively by sending signals to bending magnets downstream. Since decreasing the divergence of the beam meant to reduce transverse velocity or energy components, the suggestive term "stochastic cooling" was given to the scheme. The scheme could then be used to "cool" (to collimate) the anti-protons, which could thus be forced into a well-focused beam, suitable for acceleration to high energies, without losing too many anti-protons to collisions with the structure. Stochastic expresses the fact that signals to be taken resemble random noise, which was called "Schottky noise" when first encountered in vacuum tubes. Without van der Meer's technique, UA1 would never have had the sufficient high-intensity anti-protons it needed. Without Rubbia's realisation of its usefulness, stochastic cooling would have been the subject of a few publications and nothing else. Simon van de Meer developed and tested the technology in the proton Intersecting Storage Rings at CERN, but it is most effective on rather low-intensity beams, such as the anti-protons which were prepared for use in the SPS when configured as a collider.{{cn|date=December 2022|reason=These claims require citations}}