Credit: CERN/VOLKER STEGER

Each year, the announcement of the Nobel Prize generates a barrage of publicity. Those receiving the accolade — as this year's winners will no doubt agree — must get used to having their photo taken.

Over the past five years, science photographer Volker Steger has been revisiting past winners, to create a new set of portraits. Steger also supplied his subjects with coloured pencils and asked them to draw their discovery; each was then photographed with their drawing. The portraits now form the exhibition An Accelerator of Nobel Prize Winners inside the Globe of Science and Innovation at CERN, in Geneva.

Fittingly for an exhibition at CERN, several particle physicists feature among the prize winners. They include Jack Steinberger, who shared the Nobel in 1988 for his part in the discovery of the muon neutrino; and Simon van der Meer, whose invention of stochastic cooling made possible the proton–antiproton collisions in the SPS accelerator that resulted in the discovery of the W and Z bosons. (The SPS is now part of the injection system into the more powerful Large Hadron Collider, where there is also hope of discovering a boson...).

Sam Ting's artwork (seen in his portrait here) portrays his Nobel-winning discovery of the J particle, made at Brookhaven National Laboratory in November 1974 — on the right is the unmissable peak in the spectrum of electron–positron pairs, coming from the decay of a particle whose mass is slightly higher than 3 GeV c−2. Burton Richter (who also features in the exhibition) made the same find at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Centre at the same time, and called it the Ψ particle. This bound state of charm and anticharm quarks has been known ever since as the J/Ψ, its discovery — the 'November revolution' in the folklore of particle physics — signalling the existence of a second generation of quarks.

The exhibition runs at CERN (www.cern.ch) until 11 October 2008.