The USSR Years
In order to develop high energy physics in China, the Chinese government began from 1956 to send some experts to the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research at Dubna in the USSR to do field work and carry out the preliminary design of particle accelerators. The agreement on the establishment of JINR was signed on March 26, 1956 in Moscow, Wang Ganchang being one of the founders.
On April 4, 1956, he went to the USSR to participate in planning the long-range development of peaceful utilization of atomic energy. Then many students were sent to the former Soviet Union to learn the technologies of how to build accelerators and detectors. Thus, the experimental group led by Professor Wang Ganchang analysing more than 40,000 photographs which recorded tens of thousands of nuclear interactions taken in the propane bubble chamber produced by the 10 GeV synchrophasotron used to bombard a target forming high energy mesons, was the first to discover the anti-sigma minus hyperon particles (反西格马负超子) on March 9, 1959:
The discovery of this new unstable antiparticle which decays in (1.18±0.07)·10−10 s into an antineutron and a negative pion was announced in September of that year:
No one doubted at the time that this particle was elementary, but a few years later, this hyperon, the proton, the neutron, the pion and other hadrons had lost their status of elementary particles as they turned out to be complex particles too consisting of quarks and antiquarks.
He served as deputy director from 1958 and worked there until 1960.
Read more about this topic: Wang Ganchang
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