[News-releases] Canadian-led research zaps antimatter

[Tim Meyer]

News Release | For Immediate Release | March 7, 2012

CANADIAN-LED RESEARCH ZAPS ANTIMATTER

(Vancouver, BC) --- Three experiments, three groundbreaking scientific
advances. In their latest paper published online today by the journal
Nature, the ALPHA Collaboration at CERN reported on a measurement,
spearheaded by their Canadian collaborators, which measured for the first
time an intrinsic property of antimatter atoms. In doing so, they've
provided the world with its first glimpse of an "anti-atomic fingerprint." 
"For decades, scientists have wanted to study the intrinsic properties of
antimatter atoms in the hope of finding clues that might help answer
fundamental questions about our universe," says lead author Mike Hayden, a
physicist with Simon Fraser University. "In the middle of the last century,
physicists were developing and using microwave techniques to study ordinary
atoms like hydrogen. Now, 60 or 70 years down the road, we have just
witnessed the first-ever microwave interactions with an anti- atom." 

After ALPHA's previous two measurements demonstrated that antihydrogen (the
antimatter partner to normal hydrogen) could be trapped and then held for
long periods, the ALPHA team immediately exploited those breakthroughs with
another, detecting for the first time the response of trapped antihydrogen
to microwaves.  So-called "microwave spectroscopy" is used to make
ultra-precise measurements of atomic properties. 

"This study demonstrates the feasibility of applying microwave spectroscopy
to fiendishly difficult-to- handle anti-atoms," says co-author Walter Hardy
from the University of British Columbia. "ALPHA is about to enter an
intensive upgrade phase that promises to create an ever-clearer picture of
the inner structure of anti-matter atoms."

The ultimate goal is a precise measurement of antihydrogen's atomic
properties to compare them to the very well-known properties of normal
hydrogen.  Any discrepancy will yield invaluable information for why the
universe is dominated by normal matter, while the anti- matter has all but
disappeared. 

This latest breakthrough was driven by the Canadian contributors to the
ALPHA collaboration, led by Professors Hayden and Hardy. Hardy and Hayden
designed the apparatus for this latest experiment, working closely with
Ph.D. candidates Mohammad Ashkezari of SFU and Tim Friesen (under the
tutelage of Professor Robert Thompson) from the University of Calgary.
Meanwhile researchers from TRIUMF and York University, led by ALPHA-Canada
spokesperson Makoto Fujiwara and Professor Scott Menary, respectively,
teased faint signals from a sophisticated detector system, pinpointing
matter-antimatter annihilation events. 

ALPHA Collaboration spokesperson Jeffrey Hangst of Aarhus University pointed
out, "Hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe, and we
understand its structure extremely well.  Now we can finally begin to coax
the truth out of antihydrogen. Are they different? We can confidently say
time will tell." 

-30-

MEDIA CONTACTS

Prof. Mike Hayden
Physics Department, Simon Fraser University 
Cell: + 011.33.6.24.80.75.78 
E-mail: mhayden at sfu.ca 

Dr. Marcello Pavan
Outreach & Communications, TRIUMF
Tel: 604.222.7525 
Cell: 604.868.7466
E-mail: outreach at triumf.ca
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: NR-ALPHA-07-Mar-2012.pdf
Type: application/pdf
Size: 80074 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://lists.triumf.ca/pipermail/news-releases/attachments/20120307/1904188d/attachment-0001.pdf