Book Description

A Conference is one thing, its Proceedings is another issue. The 1976 Neutrino Conference at Aachen met with friendly approval, within and beyond the brotherhood of neutrino physicists. The generally well- informed "Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung" spoke of a "Sternstunde" of Science . . . And even without invoking the stars, we may register with some satisfaction that several important developments came to an end. "Charm is found " - hailed Alvaro de Rujula the most spectacular event of the Conference. The organizers held this opinion even before, as is evidenced by the Conference badge: a little aluminum tetra- hedron, symbolizing the four quarks, and fastened by a three-coloured string. In fact, the history of the discovery of charm goes a long way back, perhaps even back to the first CERN neutrino experiment in 1963/64, when indications of charged lepton pairs were recognized - long before charm was taken serious. Muon pairs were established by the Harvard-Pennsylvania-Wisconsin Group in 1974, and correctly inter- preted in terms of charm. At the Paris Neutrino Meeting in 1975 the BNL event came, confirming the con- nection with strangeness and suggesting charm production to occur at quite low energies.