Collider - History

History

The first serious proposal for a collider originated with a group at the Midwestern Universities Research Association (MURA). This group proposed building two tangent radial-sector FFAG accelerator rings. Tihiro Ohkawa, one of the authors of the first paper, went on to develop a radial-sector FFAG accelerator design that could accelerate two counterrotating particle beams within a single ring of magnets. The third FFAG prototype built by the MURA group was a 50 MeV electron machine built in 1961 to demonstrate the feasibility of this concept.

Gerard K. O'Neill proposed using a single accelerator to inject particles into a pair of tangent storage rings. As in the original MURA proposal, collisions would occur in the tangent section. The benefit of storage rings is that the storage ring can accumulate a high beam flux from an injection accelerator that achieves a much lower flux.

The first electron-positron colliders were built in Italy, at the Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare in Frascati near Rome, by the Austrian-Italian physicist Bruno Touschek. Around the same time, in the early 1960s, the VEP-1 electron-electron collider was independently developed and built under supervision of Gersh Budker in the Soviet Institute of Nuclear Physics.

In 1966, work began on the Intersecting Storage Rings at CERN, and in 1971, this collider was operational. The ISR was a pair of storage rings that accumulated particles injected by the CERN Proton Synchrotron. This was the first hadron collider, as all of the earlier efforts had worked with electrons or with electrons and positrons.