On 24 February 1983 the journal Physics Letters B published a paper entitled Experimental observation of large transverse energy electrons with associated missing energy at √s= 540 GeV which described the discovery of W boson. The paper, by the UA1 collaboration at CERN, described the results of two searches made on data recorded at the Super Proton Synchrotron while it was running as a proton-antiproton collider. On 17 March 1983, the UA2 collaboration published their paper describing their simultaneous discovery of the W boson at the CERN proton-antiproton collider.

The charged W boson is a fundamental particle that, together with the Z boson, is responsible for the weak force, one of four fundamental forces that govern the behaviour of matter in the universe. Particles of matter interact by exchanging these bosons, but only over short distances. The discovery of the W boson by the two experiments was announced in a press conference at CERN on 25 January 1983.

Read the papers:

"Experimental observation of large transverse energy electrons with associated missing energy at √s= 540 GeV" – UA1 collaboration, 24 February 1983

"Observation of single isolated electrons of high transverse momentum in events with missing transverse energy at the CERN pp collider" – UA2 collaboration, 17 March 1983