Hardy helps trapping anti-hydrogen

Atoms of antimatter have been trapped and stored for the first time by the ALPHA collaboration, an international team of scientists working at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research near Geneva, Switzerland. An account of this research has been published in the Nov 17th issue of Nature.

A UBC team, led by Prof. Walter N. Hardy, and including Ph.D. student, Andrea Gutierrez, and a former M.Sc. student, Sarah Self El Nasr, has made very important contributions to this international project. Prof. Hardy has been invited to participate in this international project due to his world-leading expertise in low temperature physics and precision microwave spectroscopy. In particular, he is the then world record holder of stability of cryogenic atomic hydrogen maser, in research he conducted in 1980s at UBC, together with his then student Michael Hayden, who is now an SFU professor.

For details of UBC contributions see this Note by M. Fujiwara. For details on the science, please see this Berkeley Labs release