Physicist Set To Return After Breakthrough

Professor of Physics Carlo Rubbia, fresh from his internationally acclaimed discovery last week of the subatomic "W" particle, will return from Switzerland tomorrow to resume teaching.

Rubbia, who has taken several leaves of absence since 1977 to work at the CERN atomic research center near Geneva, will teach the graduate-level Physics 248, "Topics in Nuclear and/or Particle Physics" this spring before he returns to Europe in May to continue research.

Fellow physicists yesterday hailed the discovery of the W particle and many said that Rubbia stands a good chance of winning the Nobel Prize this October.

But Rubbia said Monday in an interview from his Geneva home that his American colleagues were "not very interested" when he and a small group of scientists proposed a scheme to produce the W particle. "There was a hell of a lot of opposition when we submitted our proposal," Rubbia said, noting that Harvard was among the institutions that declined to sponsor the multi-million dollar project.

Paul C. Martin, dean of the Division of Applied Sciences, said yesterday. "He's received significant support from the University in the form of accomodations to his work schedule and in respect to support for his experiment. If he believed he hasn't received support then I would be disappointed that he has that impression."

"Rubia's proposal was grated with a certain amount of 'Gee. that's really neat." George W. Brandenburg, associate director of Harvard's High Energy Physics Laboratory, said yesterday. "It was an outlandish idea, though you had to admit it was worth a try."

The discovery confirms at least part of the so-called grand unification theories physics, which state that a single force controls all of nature's basic forces.

The CERN team, which included physicists from Austria, Switzerland, the United States, Italy, France, and Britain, was able to produce the subparticle by accelerating protons and their antimatter twins, antiprotons, in opposite directions around an underground ring which lies beneath parts of France and Switzerland. The W particles were produced when the protons and antiprotons collided, creating a blast of energy in the ring, which is four miles in circumference.

Rubia will attempt to confirm the theories further by finding the "Z" particle when he recomences experiments in Geneva this summer.

Theoretical Physicists Steven Weinberg, then-Higgens Professor of Physics, and Pakistani physicist Adbus Salam predicted the location and weight of the W and Z particles as early as 1967. Weinberg, Salam, and current Higgins Professor of Physics Scheldon L. Glashow shared the Nobel Prize in 1979 for their work on the unification theories. "If Rubbia had not confirmed the existence of the W particle, theoretical physicists would have been running around emitting sharp cries," Weinberg, who now teaches at the University of Texas, said yesterday.

"This is a monumental and fantastic achievement, Glashow agreed yesterday, adding that a Nobel Prize for Rubbia is "perfectly plausible."

Brandenburg called Rubbia "exciting and audacious," adding that his willingness to follow-up on his own ideas led him to the W particle. "He's the fastest moving man around," Brandenburg said. "When Cairo is around there's never a dull moment.