Public lecture

"Setting Traps for Antimatter"

Prof. Gerald Gabrielse

Leverett Professor of Physics, Harvard University

Thursday, June 11^th 2015, 19:00 - 20:00
Main Aula of Collegium Novum of the Jagiellonian University
The lecture is open to the public

According to the best description of modern physics, the big bang created essentially equal amounts of antimatter and matter. As the universe cooled, the particles made of antimatter and matter should have annihilated each other as they collided. Trying to understand the great mystery of how and why a whole universe survived despite our "predictions" to the contrary has stimulated searches for tiny and unexpected differences between antimatter and matter. The containment of the charged and neutral antimatter to be studied is a significant challenge to this quest. This lecture describes antimatter containment in "traps" - containers with no walls - and illustrates the way that antimatter and matter are most precisely compared.

About the speaker

Gerald Gabrielse is the Leverett Professor of Physics at Harvard and a member of the NAS. His ideas and demonstrations launched and guide the low energy antiproton and antihydrogen physics being pursued by hundreds at a storage ring built for this purpose. His demonstration (with the TRAP collaboration he led) that the antiproton and proton have charge-to-mass ratios that are opposite to 9 parts in 10¹¹ is the most stringent baryon test of the CPT symmetry that is intrinsic to the standard model of particle physics. His proposal to form and trap cold antihydrogen has been realize by the ATRAP team he leads and others. The electron magnetic moment that he measured to 3 parts in 10¹³ is the most precisely measured property of an elementary particle. This made possible the most precise confrontation of theory and experiment, with his measurement confirming what is the standard model's most precise prediction. His electron electric dipole measurement (with the ACME collaboration) advanced the state of the art by a factor of 12, constraining proposed extensions to the standard model at the TeV energy scales being investigated at the LHC.

In addition to supervising the PhD research of more than 40 students, Gabrielse chaired the Harvard Physics Department and the DAMOP division of the APS. His many awards include both Harvard’s Levenson prize for exceptional teaching and its Ledlie prize for exceptional research. The APS awarded him both its Davvison-Germer Prize and its Lilienfeld Prize. Germany awarded the Humboldt Research Award and Italy the Tomassoni and Chisesi Prize. He is widely sought after for lectures on his physics research, for science lectures to high school students, teachers and the general public, and for lectures on science and religion. For the latter he received the Trotter Prize.

A complete CV is available at: http://gabrielse.physics.harvard.edu/gabrielse/resume.html