| Citation | Rubbia has been an outstanding initiator in new areas of high energy physics. His work provided the first evidence of opposite sign di-muons in high energy neutrino processes, one of the first indications of the existence of charmed particles. He proposed the first recoil-less hypernuclear excitation experiment, leading to the currently productive field of hypernuclear spectroscopy. His earlier experiments also contributed significantly to our knowledge of the only interaction known to be non-symmetric under time reversal, and of the rise in the proton-proton cross section with increasing energy. He has been, most notably, the proposer and major force in the imaginative development of the Super Proton Synchroton [sic] at CERN for use as a storage ring (the CERN Collider) to study the interaction of oppositely-directed proton and antiproton beams. This has increased the collision energy available for new particle creation by more than one order of magnitude compared with existing facilities (Intersecting Storage Rings, CERN). His present experiment with the Collider has been one of the most successful in this century, establishing the existence, and measuring the masses, of the W+- and Z0 bosons, the interaction carriers predicted to exist in theories unifying weak and electromagnetic interactions. The experiment also opens up the way for systematic studies of heavy quarks and leptons and their fundamental interactions in a most productive and clear-cut energy regime. |