“It’s tricky, right? That this is what gets headlined in the tabloids. In one of our recurring questions, we asked Will whether he was frustrated with the way the work that’s taking place on the LHC is sometime reported in the mainstream media. And so CERN’s not the only institute in the world that can and has produced antiprotons, but they are the unique facility in the world right now that produces antiprotons that are low enough energy for experiments like Alpha to trap those antiprotons, and then use them for other sorts of experiments.”
And in order to create that kind of reaction, you need accelerators.
If you want antiprotons on earth, you need to produce them with a relatively high energy interaction. The connection to CERN is that antiprotons are more difficult. Okay, that’s not very practical for experiments we use salts that have been activated in a reactor to get a good flux for ourselves. So a banana produces about 15 positrons a second. In fact, bananas turn out to be a reasonably good source of positrons because they’re a good source of potassium and some small fraction of naturally occurring potassium is a radioactive isotope that produces positrons when it decays. You can get them from the radioactive decay of species you can just find naturally occurring on earth.
Positrons are relatively easy to come by as anti-matter particles are concerned. “We’re making antihydrogen by combining anti-matter electrons called positrons with anti-matter protons called antiprotons. We asked Will what the Alpha experiment actually involves I spent basically the second half of my studentship working on this prototype experiment, and then incorporating the ideas and designs from that aspect of the prototype into the overall first version of the Alpha experiment that was built at CERN and started operating in about 2006.”īananas turn out to be a reasonably good source of positrons because they’re a good source of potassium… a banana produces about 15 positrons a second
#Bananas produce antimatter full#
And so we as a lab agreed to work with Alpha and got involved pretty early on in then making the full Alpha experiment. And the work was really in the wheelhouse of some of the work that Joel had done in the lab at Berkeley. And halfway through my studentship, my supervisor got contacted by the folks who were forming the Alpha collaboration at CERN – sort of a spin out of a collaboration called Athena, which was one of the first antihydrogen collaborations. And at the time, the supervisor that I worked for, Joel Fajans, at UC Berkeley, was doing some interesting work with non-neutral plasmas and the nonlinearities associated with those plasmas. I was kind of interested in nonlinear dynamics, but also experimental physics. “When I started my graduate student career, I started in plasma physics. We started by asking Will how he got involved with working on the Alpha experiment at CERN. Will is a lecturer with the Accelerator Physics group in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University, as well as a lecturer in the Cockcroft Institute. In the latest in our mini-series of posts about the work our scientists are carrying out at CERN, we speak to Will Bertsche. Departments Research impact and institutes 9th November 2022
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