Five experiments, five decades
A run of experiments that between them assembled the Standard Model and then began to probe past it: the first direct sight of quark scattering, the decay of the b quark, the discovery of the W and Z bosons, the discovery of the Higgs boson, and now the accelerating expansion of the universe.
E260 Fermilab 1977–1980Observation and measurement of hadron jets from quark scattering — among the first direct evidence that hadrons collide through their constituents.
CLEO CESR, Cornell 1980–1983Observation of the Υ(4S), the first measurements of b → c decay, and the first reconstruction of B mesons.
UA1 CERN SPS collider 1983–1991Discovery of the W and Z bosons, and measurement of their masses and spin, confirming the unification of the electromagnetic and weak forces.
CMS Large Hadron Collider, CERN 1991–Discovery of the Higgs boson, completing the Standard Model, and the search for what lies beyond it.
DESI Mayall Telescope, Kitt Peak 2024–The largest three-dimensional map of the universe, measuring dark energy and the sum of the neutrino masses.
1,730 publications on INSPIRE, including the discovery papers of the W boson (3,500 citations), the Z boson (3,000) and the Higgs boson (16,900).
Citation counts from INSPIRE-HEP, August 2026.