Tonight is the night that I fly out of Toronto destined for Geneva, Switzerland.  I am spending two months at CERN, which is the European Organization for Nuclear Research (french: Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire).  I am beginning graduate school in pursuit of a Master’s degree in Physics and Astronomy at York University in September 2015.  My supervisor, Dr. Scott Menary, works on the ALPHA (Antihydrogen Laser PHysics Apparatus) collaboration.  Scott is sending me and another Master’s student named James, also starting in September, to CERN so we can learn more about how the experiment was designed, and how it is run.  (ALPHA Canada recently received funding from the Canadian Foundation for Innovation (CFI) to continue to probe the imbalance of matter in the universe!)

The experiment is located at CERN because large accelerators are required to create incredibly high energy particle collisions.  One of the by-products of these collisions is the antiproton, the negatively charged counterpart to the proton.  We slow the antiprotons down again to study them, which is why the ALPHA experiment resides in the Antiproton Decelerator Hall.  CERN was the first institution to create large numbers of antiatoms in 2002, and since then several world-class experiments have made exciting progress in studying it.   You can see a really cool timeline here!

The ALPHA-2 experiment, currently in operation, is using radiation to study various atomic properties of anti-hydrogen (an antiproton bound to a positron).  A new experiment called ALPHA-g aims to study how antimatter interacts with the gravitational force.  The ALPHA website says:

Physicists have long wondered if the gravitational interaction between antimatter and matter might be different than that between matter and itself. Do atoms made of antimatter, like antihydrogen, fall at a different rate to those made of matter, or might they even fall up — antigravity? There are many arguments that make the case that the interaction must be the same, but no-one has ever observed what an anti-atom does in a gravitational field – until now.

I’m very excited to begin learning from the amazing scientists at CERN, and working with people from all over the world.

I’ve been to France and Switzerland once before, and both countries were so beautiful – I can’t wait to be back.  For the first few weeks at least, I will be staying in a hotel in St. Genis-Pouilly, which is in France right at the Franco-Swiss border.  I’ll be walking across the border to get to work every day!  It is illegal to walk across the Windsor-Detroit border, where I grew up!

That’s it for now, but if you have any questions for me, please get in touch using my contact form and I will answer them in my next post!