His passion was high-energy physics. In 1969, Horst Dieter Wahl received his doctorate in physics from the University of Vienna. This was followed by research activities at CERN, at Stony Brook University in New York State and at Florida State University in Tallahassee.
Horst Dieter Wahl devoted his research mainly to the weak nuclear force and electromagnetic interaction. He was also interested in CMS, Compact Muon Solenoid Experiment, a multi-purpose detector to measure the different particles produced by the collisions of protons. Wahl was involved in research projects at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, a U.S. particle physics center. Here, among other things, proton-antiproton collisions were studied at the Tevatron accelerator. The Tevatron was the world’s highest-energy particle accelerator; it was replaced by the Large Hadron Collider in 2009.
Wahl received numerous awards, including the Erwin Schrödinger Prize of the Austrian Academy of Sciences.