SatLecture Seminar: Casting Light on Antimatter: The ALPHA Antimatter Project at CERN
Speaker: Makoto Fujiwara, TRIUMF
Location: TRIUMF Auditorium
Time: 11:00
Antimatter is the twin partner of normal matter. When the Universe began in the Big Bang, physicists believe, equal amounts of matter and antimatter were created. If we look at the Universe today, however, we see very little antimatter. What happened to antimatter? We are addressing this problem by artificially creating atoms of antimatter, antihydrogen, at the CERN laboratory in Geneva. Recently, we succeeded in stably confining antihydrogen for as long as 1000 seconds. With trapped antihydrogen, we hope to study fundamental properties of antimatter such as: does antimatter shine in the same colours of light as matter? Or does it fall down via gravity in the same manner as matter?