AdA: the world’s first electron-positron collider

On Thursday 5 December 2013, the Italian National Institute of Nuclear Physics [INFN] Frascati National Laboratory [LNF] was honoured as an EPS Historic Site for the realization of the Storage Ring AdA, the first ever particle-antiparticle collider. The AdA was built at the LNF in 1961 by a small team of Italian physicists under the lead of the Austrian physicist Bruno Touschek.

AdA was designed to store beams of 250 MeV energy. By 1962 it had stored electrons, and it was soon transferred…