The Z boson had been discovered in proton-antiproton collisions at the European laboratory CERN in 1983. Now SLAC’s SLC raced against CERN’s Large Electron-Positron collider (LEP) to produce Z bosons in high-energy electron-positron collisions, with the Zs decaying into pairs of quarks or other particles. Measuring the decay of many Zs would yield new information on the subatomic forces of nature.
On April 12, 1989, Erickson’s journal documents the first Z that was created by the SLC. A scientist sifting through data recorded by the MARK-II detector found the evidence for the particle while the SLC was offline.
Roger Erickson, SLAC
