Tag archives: ALPHA

Mind over antimatter: Jeffrey Hangst at the ALPHA experiment at CERN.

By Tushna Commissariat at CERN

While visiting CERN, the world’s biggest particle-physics laboratory, it’s easy to get swept up by the excitement of the Large Hadron Collider and its detectors, especially in the run up to it being switched back on in the coming weeks. But CERN is also host to a variety of other equally exciting experiments that probe some of the biggest unanswered questions in science, such as the experiments that probe the unwieldy world of antimatter. Indeed, CERN’s antimatter programme has received considerable attention in the past, especially thanks to the now-famous book (and later, film) Angels and Demons, where some antimatter was supposedly stolen from the laboratory and used to build a bomb! Suffice to say, antimatter is of interest to physicists and the public alike and so I caught up with physicist Jeffrey Hangst, who is spokesperson of the Antihydrogen Laser Physics Apparatus (ALPHA) experiment, which I also had the chance to visit.

Antimatter factory: a view of the ALPHA 2 set-up.

(more…)