“Antimatter: Understanding and Exploration”
 Professor Fajans |
An Evening of Conversation
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 Doug McConnell |
Tuesday, January 25th, 2011 7:30 pm – 9:00 pmLocation: Black Pine Circle School, 2027 7th Street, Berkeley, California 94710RSVP: Greta Wong gwong@blackpinecircle.org |
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An Important Moment in Science: Berkeley physicists seeking to pierce a mystery as old as the universe joined an international team of scientists on November 18th, 2010 to report they had trapped and stored a few dozen atoms of antimatter — the stuff that annihilates ordinary matter in a single explosive flash of energy. Cosmologists have long believed that the Big Bang produced exactly equal amounts of antimatterand ordinary matter. All of this matter and antimatter should have annihilated, leaving nothing left over. But while all the antimatter did indeed disappear, enough of the matter was left over to form all the galaxies, stars and planets that we observe today. No one knows why some of the matter was left over.“It’s one of the fundamental mysteries of the Big Bang”, Joel Fajans reported, “and now that we know how to store it, we’ll soon have enough atoms of antimatter to hold in our hands long enough to study questions like how it behaves in real-world gravity, what its fundamental role was in the evolution of the universe, and how it behaves when we excite it with laser beams.” (SF Chronicle, November 2010)
View The Fajans Group page
View The ALPHA Collaboration page
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