The story of an exhibit

My mark on science

The end. The beginning in № 44

When the Dubna synchrophasotron, a year and a half after its launch, started operating for real, the first results obtained in a 24-liter propane chamber were reported at the Rochester Conference in Kyiv in August, 1959.

The Conference participants were especially interested in the news that traces of an unknown particle had been discovered in Dubna. And although there was no complete certainty yet, the particle had already obtained the working name D-boson, in honor of Dubna.

Three years later, the participants in those events recalled (from the notebook of Galina Nikolaeva that was going to write a novel about physicists): "They seemed to have discovered a D-particle. They announced it at the Rochester Conference in Kiev. They came back, looked at 10 thousand pictures - there was no particle. A scandal - they announced it at the highest level… What to do? In two months - finish discovering it. Who will take responsibility?.."

The year 1959 is drawing to a close. In November, a new flagship in high energy physics was launched at CERN - a tight-focus accelerator for 25 GeV. With a beam intensity, by the way, 50 times greater than in Dubna and therefore, statistics will be collected there just as much faster… How can one compete in such conditions? Director of the Joint Institute D.I.Blokhintsev wrote in his diary: "KM* has not yet been 'commodified' - this is the main problem of the future…"

The future was already knocking at the door. At the very end of January or at the very beginning of 1960 (or rather, A.A.Kuznetsov that was lucky, could not remember more than forty years later) an event was discovered in one of 40 thousand photographs, which the discoverer wrote about: "I must say that this event was noticeably different from the stars seen earlier! I felt that there was something unusual in it…"

This was the first indication of the famous antisigma-minus-hyperon. And then "...the long work of the sector employees, lasting almost two months, began on calculating and analyzing this unusual event... Early in the morning of 24 March, 1960, at the request of Academician V.I.Veksler, I left for Moscow to urgently deliver to the editorial office of the scientific journal JETP the manuscript of our future article "Birth of the antisigma-minus-hyperon using negatively charged pions with a momentum of 8.3 GeV/c"... I told V.I.Veksler with relief: "Now we have, as they say, justified the construction of the accelerator." And Dmitry Ivanovich could have added: now we have, as they say, justified the establishment of the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research - after all, the discovery was made by a multinational team of scientists from socialist countries...

The Museum of History of Science and Technology of JINR keeps one of the prints of that unique photograph, in which the tiny particle that saved the honor of Dubna left its mark on science: in this photograph, among many other events of the microworld, its entire tiny life of 150 picoseconds fits in.

And what about the D-boson? - the inquisitive reader will ask. A year later, American colleagues remembered it at the next Rochester Conference in America. And the first to ask this question was the future Nobel prize winner Luis Alvarez, breathing down Veksler's neck: what about the D-particle? Nothing can be ruled out - Vladimir Iosifovich answered meaningfully.

A. R.

*KM - this is how, according to the tradition that had developed in the Atomic Project, Veksler's accelerator was still called.