[News-releases] Science News Release : Canadian researchers instrumental in game-changing antimatter study

Fri Jun 3 16:54:34 PDT 2011

Upping the Anti:
Canadian researchers instrumental in game-changing antimatter study 

TRIUMF News Release 
For Immediate Release

(Vancouver, BC) Science fiction is fast approaching science fact as
researchers are progressing rapidly toward "bottling" antimatter.  In
a paper published online today by the journal Nature Physics, the
ALPHA experiment at CERN, including key Canadian contributors, reports
that it has succeeded in storing antimatter atoms for over 16 minutes.
While carrying around bottled antimatter like in the movie Angels and
Demons remains fundamentally far-fetched, storing antimatter for long
periods of time opens up new vistas for scientists struggling to
understand this elusive substance.  ALPHA managed to store twice the
antihydrogen (the antimatter partner to normal hydrogen) 5,000 times
longer than the previous best, setting the stage, for example, to test
whether antihydrogen and normal hydrogen fall the same way due to
gravity.

Lead author Makoto Fujiwara, TRIUMF research scientist, University of
Calgary adjunct professor, and spokesperson of the Canadian part of
the ALPHA team said,"We know we have confined antihydrogen atoms for
at least for 1,000 seconds. That's almost as long as one period in
hockey! This is potentially a game changer in antimatter research."

Antimatter remains one of the biggest mysteries of science.  At the
Big Bang, matter and antimatter should have been produced equally, but
since they destroy each other upon contact, eventually nothing should
have remained but pure energy (light).  However, all observations
suggest that only the antimatter has vanished.  To figure out what
happened to the lost half of the universe, scientists are eager to
determine if, as predicted, the laws of physics are the same for both
matter and antimatter. ALPHA uses an analogue of a very well-known
system in physics, the hydrogen atom (one electron orbiting one
proton), and testing whether its antimatter twin, antihydrogen (an
antielectron orbiting an antiproton), behaves the same. But to study
something one must hold onto it long enough.

Fujiwara asks, "Does antimatter shine in the same colour as matter?
Does it experience the gravity in the same way as matter? These are
still very difficult experiments, and they will take long and hard
work, but this new result is a very important step.  Now experiments
will be about 10,000 times less difficult than before!" Explained
ALPHA spokesperson Jeffrey Hangst of Aarhus University, "This would
provide the first-ever look inside the structure of antihydrogen -
element 1 on the anti-periodic table."

Antihydrogen atoms were first made in large quantities at CERN eight
years ago, but can't be stored conventionally since antiatoms touching
the ordinary-matter walls of a bottle would instantly annihilate. The
ALPHA collaboration succeeded by developing a sophisticated "magnetic
bottle" using a state-of-the-art superconducting magnet to suspend the
antiatoms away from the walls, last year demonstrating definitive
proof of antihydrogen atom capture for about a tenth of a second,
likely the first contained antiatoms in the history of the universe.

Canadian scientists have been playing leading roles in the
antihydrogen detection and data analysis aspects of the project.  The
next step for ALPHA is to start performing measurements on bottled
antihydrogen, and this is due to get underway later this year.  The
first step is to illuminate the trapped anti-atoms with microwaves to
determine if they absorb exactly the same frequencies (or energies) as
their matter twins.

"I've always liked hydrogen atoms", said Walter Hardy of the
University of British Columbia, a leading expert in atomic hydrogen
studies. "It's ironic that we are now trying to measure the same
properties of antihydrogen that I measured many years ago on regular
hydrogen.  It is a crucial comparison, though, and will tell us if we
truly understand the relationship between matter and antimatter."

Support for ALPHA-Canada and its research came from NSERC (National
Science and Engineering Research Council, TRIUMF, AIF (Alberta
Ingenuity Fund), the Killam Trust, and FQRNT (Le Fonds quebecois de la
recherche sur la nature et les technologies). 
                                   ### 

About TRIUMF: 
TRIUMF is Canada's national laboratory for particle and nuclear
physics.  Located on the south campus of the University of British
Columbia, TRIUMF is owned and operated as a joint venture by a
consortium of the following Canadian universities, via a contribution
through the National Research Council Canada and building capital
funds from the Government of British Columbia: University of Alberta,
University of British Columbia, University of Calgary, Carleton
University, University of Guelph, University of Manitoba, McMaster
University, Universite de Montreal, University of Northern British
Columbia, Queen's University, University of Regina, Saint Mary's
University, Simon Fraser University, University of Toronto, University
of Victoria, University of Winnipeg, York University.  

See http://www.triumf.ca. 

About ALPHA-Canada: 
ALPHA is a collaboration of about 40 physicists from 15 institutions
from Canada, Brazil, Denmark, Israel, Japan, Sweden, UK, and the
USA. ALPHA-Canada currently consists of 8 senior scientists, 5
graduate students, and several professional staff from 5 Canadian
institutions. ALPHA-Canada constitute about one third of the entire
ALPHA collaboration. 14 out of 40 ALPHA co-authors in the reported
work are with ALPHA-Canada: Andrea Gutierrez, Sarah Seif El Nasr,
Walter Hardy (Univ. of British Columbia), Tim Friesen, Richard
Hydomako, Robert Thompson (Univ. of Calgary), Mohammad Ashkezari,
Michael Hayden (Simon Fraser Univ.), Scott Menary (York Univ.), Makoto
Fujiwara, David Gill, Leonid Kurchaninov, Konstantin Olchanski, Art
Olin, James Storey (TRIUMF).

See http://alpha.web.cern.ch/alpha & http://angelsanddemons.cern.ch. 

Media Contacts 
--------------
Dr. Makoto Fujiwara
Research Scientist
TRIUMF / U. Calgary
Tel:  604-222-7585
Cell: 604.363.5028
makoto.fujiwara at triumf.ca

Dr. Marcello Pavan 
Outreach & Communications
TRIUMF
Tel:  604.222.7525
Cell: 604 868 7466
outreach at triumf.ca

en francais: Ms Andrea Gutierrez
Graduate Student
UBC 
Tel: +41.76.487.3832
andrea.gutierrez at triumf.ca

-------------------------------
Marcello M. Pavan, Ph.D.
TRIUMF
4004 Wesbrook Mall
Vancouver, B.C. V6T 2A3
Canada

Tel: 1.604.222.7525
Fax: 1.604.222.1074

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.triumf.ca/pipermail/news-releases/attachments/20110603/7d3a4b6c/attachment-0002.html 
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: PR-ALPHA-05-Jun-2011.pdf
Type: application/pdf
Size: 83033 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://lists.triumf.ca/pipermail/news-releases/attachments/20110603/7d3a4b6c/attachment-0001.pdf 
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.triumf.ca/pipermail/news-releases/attachments/20110603/7d3a4b6c/attachment-0003.html 