Landmark ALPHA result garners editor’s pick among 15 years of Nature Physics

November 15, 2020
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The ALPHA experiment at CERN; former UBC student Andrea Gutierrez (right) [Credit: Maximilian Brice/CERN]

(via TRIUMF) The 2011 paper Confinement of antihydrogen for 1000 seconds, published by the Antihydrogen Laser Physics Apparatus (ALPHA) group including then graduate students Andrea Gutierrez (UBC) and Chukman So (Berkeley), has been tapped as a Nature Physics editor’s favourite admist a 15-year round-up of top papers.

In Sweet Fifteen, the publication’s fifteen-year anniversary special edition, Nature Physics editors share a nod to ALPHA’s achievement of trapping and containing more than 300 atoms of anti-hydrogen atoms for a record-breaking 16 minutes - the world’s first prolongued look at the elusive substance.

“It was really exciting to see that we could trap antihydrogen for such a long time,” said Dr. Andrea Gutierrez, who led the detector analysis for the paper, and is now a Marie Sklodowska Curie Fellow at Delft University of Technology.

Since antimatter annihilates upon contact with matter, learning how to confine and store antimatter in our matter world was a necessary first step for the collaboration’s endeavours in experimental antimatter research. Building from Confinement of antihydrogen for 1000 seconds, the ALPHA collaboration has since published a number of important papers describing the physical properties of antimatter, including several increasingly precise spectroscopic and charge measurements. 

In Sweet Fifteen, the publication’s fifteen-year anniversary special edition, Nature Physics editors share a nod to ALPHA’s achievement of trapping and containing more than 300 atoms of anti-hydrogen atoms for a record-breaking 16 minutes - the world’s first prolongued look at the elusive substance.

“It was really exciting to see that we could trap antihydrogen for such a long time,” said Dr. Andrea Gutierrez, who led the detector analysis for the paper, and is now a Marie Sklodowska Curie Fellow at Delft University of Technology.

Since antimatter annihilates upon contact with matter, learning how to confine and store antimatter in our matter world was a necessary first step for the collaboration’s endeavours in experimental antimatter research. Building from Confinement of antihydrogen for 1000 seconds, the ALPHA collaboration has since published a number of important papers describing the physical properties of antimatter, including several increasingly precise spectroscopic and charge measurements. 

UBC Connections

The ALPHA collaboration has a strong connection with UBC. At the time of the 2011 publication, ALPHA team members include PHAS professor emeritus Walter Hardy, then PhD student Andrea Gutierrez, and PHAS alumni Michael Hayden, now a professor at SFU and Makoto C. Fujiwara, who is the ALPHA-Canada Spokesperson & a researcher at TRIUMF. You can see many PHAS members in this 2-minute video on anti-matter research.

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