Trilling was on sabbatical leave to CERN in 1973–74,[2] where he worked on the study of the properties of charm particles, their decay modes and excited states.
After the SSC was cancelled in 1993, Trilling transitioned most of the SDC team to collaborate on the ATLAS experiment at the LHC, which led to the discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012.
[6] Already as an undergraduate at Caltech, Trilling worked in the laboratory of Carl Anderson, where cosmic rays were observed using cloud chambers.
[7] In his thesis work, done in connection with Robert Leighton, Trilling studied "strange" particles, whose name reflected their surprisingly long lifetimes, on the scale of nanoseconds, much more than a trillion times longer than would have been expected.
In 1959, Glaser moved to University of California, Berkeley, and recruited Trilling to join him there as a tenured associate professor in 1960.
The SLAC-LBL team at SPEAR discovered the J/ψ meson, its recurrence ψ', charm particles and the tau lepton.
The Mark II detector was subsequently used at the Stanford Linear Collider (SLC), whose energy was designed for the production of the Z boson.
When the SSC project was terminated in 1993, Trilling became a leader in the American effort to join the analogous program at CERN, the Large Hadron Collider.