The Shifting Balance of Power in Experimental Particle Physics

For 30 years after the second world war, the United States dominated experimental particle physics. This dominance was particularly pronounced during the 1950s, when the leading US machines dwarfed those in Western Europe, while ostensibly equivalent facilities in the Soviet Union posed little threat. The 1960s witnessed the beginning of a European challenge from the new Proton Synchrotron at the joint European laboratory CERN near Geneva and from various smaller machines in national laboratories such as DESY at Hamburg. Yet despite a broad similarity in the research facilities available on either side of the Atlantic, the major discoveries of the 1960s—the $Ω−,$ the two types of neutrino, CP violation and deep inelastic electron scattering—all came from the US.