Rubbia, Carlo (1934– )

Italian physicist and director-general of CERN, the European nuclear research organization 1989–93. Rubbia shared the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1984 with his colleague Simon van der Meer for contributions to the discovery in 1983 of the W and Z particles (weakons), the agents responsible for transferring the weak nuclear force.

Rubbia was born in Gorizia and studied at Pisa, Rome, and in the USA at Columbia. He worked at CERN from 1960 and concurrently served as professor of physics at Harvard 1972–88.