The European Physical Society (EPS) has defended its handling of the 2009 prize for high-energy and particle physics despite complaints that the awarding committee overlooked a vital scientific contribution to the prize-winning work. The biennial award, worth SwFr 5000, was given to collaborators on the Gargamelle bubble-chamber experiment at CERN for their discovery in 1973 of the " weak neutral current" – one of the ways in which the weak nuclear force is mediated between fundamental particles. However, the award did not formally recognize the "leptonic" evidence for neutral currents, without which some particle physicists say the discovery could not have been made.
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