The CERN antiproton collider programme: accelerators and accumulation rings

One of CERN's most daring and successful undertakings was the quest for the intermediate bosons, W and Z. In this paper, we describe the accelerator part of the venture which relied on a number of innovations: an extension of the budding method of stochastic cooling by many orders of magnitude; the construction of the Antiproton Accumulator, depending on several novel accelerator methods and technologies; major modifications to the 26 GeV PS Complex; and the radical conversion of the 300 GeV SPS, which just had started up as an accelerator, to a proton-antiproton collider. The SPS Collider had to master the beam-beam effect far beyond limits reached ever before and had to function in a tight symbiosis with the huge detectors UA1 and UA2.