A PERIODICAL OF PARTICLE PHYSICS WINTER 1995 VOL. 25, NUMBER 4 Editors RENE DONALDSON, BILL KIRK Contributing Editor MICHAEL RIORDAN Editorial Advisory Board JAMES BJORKEN, GEORGE BROWN, ROBERT N. CAHN, DAVID HITLIN, JOEL PRIMACK, NATALIE ROE, ROBERT SIEMANN Illustrations page 4 TERRY ANDERSON Distribution CRYSTAL TILGHMAN The Beam Line is published quarterly by the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, PO Box 4349, Stanford, CA 94309. Telephone: (415) 926-2585 INTERNET:
[email protected] FAX: (415) 926-4500 Issues of the Beam Line are accessible electronically on uayc ou the World Wide Web at http://www.slac.stanford.edu/ pubs/beamline/beamline.html SLAC is operated by Stanford University under contract with the U.S. Department of Energy. The opinions of the authors do not necessarily reflect the policy of the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center. Cover: Martin Perl (left) and Frederick Reines (center) receive the 1995 Nobel Prize in physics from His Majesty the King of Sweden at the awards ceremony last December. (Photograph courtesy of Joseph Peri) Printed on recycled paper tj) . CONTENTS FEATURES "We conclude that the signature e-/. events cannot be explained either by the production and decay of any presently known particles 4 Discovery of the Tau or as coming from any of the well- THE ROLE OF MOTIVATION & understood interactions which can TECHNOLOGY IN EXPERIMENTAL conventionally lead to an e and a PARTICLE PHYSICS gu in the final state. A possible ex- One of this year's Nobel Prize in physics planation for these events is the recipients describes the discovery production and decay of a pair of of the tau lepton in his 1975 new particles, each having a mass SLAC experiment.