Free Public Lecture - Gerald Gabrielse (Leverett Professor of Physics, Harvard University) "Setting Traps for Antimatter"
Tuesday June 9, 2015 - 7:30 pm
Hyatt Regency Columbus - Regency Ballroom - 3rd Floor
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 University and a member of the National Academy of Sciences. His electron magnetic moment (g-2) measurement (at 3 parts in 1013 precision) provides the most stringent confrontation of theory and experiment confirming quantum electrodynamics (QED, the strange theory of light and matter). His pioneering work with low-energy antiprotons contributed to the foundations for testing fundamental symmetries with trapped antimatter, including a baryon test of CPT invariance with a 9 parts in 1011 measurement of the proton/antiproton charge-to-mass ratio, as well as proposal and realization of cold antihydrogen formation by the ATRAP team which he leads. As part of the ACME collaboration a new limit was set for the electron electric dipole moment, constraining proposed extensions to the standard model. In addition to supervising the PhD research of over 40 students, Gabrielse chaired the Harvard Physics Department and DAMOP. His awards include Harvard’s Levenson prize for exceptional teaching, the Ledlie prize for exceptional research, the APS’ Davisson-Germer Prize and Lilienfeld Prizes, a Humboldt Research Award, and Tomassoni, Trotter and Chisesi Prizes.
