Oh my!  It’s my last weekend at CERN, and in celebration I’d like to share a story about beer!

Legend has it that when Niels Bohr won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1922 for his services in the investigation of the structure of atoms and of the radiation emanating from them, the Carlsberg Brewing Company gave him a house next door to the brewery.  The house supposedly had a direct pipeline supplying free beer on demand!

Today, the ALPHA collaboration at CERN studies anti-hydrogen: the antimatter counterpart of the hydrogen atom studied by Neils Bohr.  The Carlsberg Foundation has continued to sponsor the work of atomic physicists and has contributed to the ALPHA-2 experiment.  They provided funding for a powerful octupole magnet built by Oxford Instruments.  A big sticker appears on the side of the ALPHA-2 vacuum chamber and the magnet inside is affectionately known as the “Carlsberg magnet” in our day-to-day work.

How ALPHA-2 Uses the Octupole Magnet

An octupole magnet is a magnet with eight magnetic poles, made of very precisely wound copper wire.  When electricity is sent through the copper wires, a magnetic field is created that keeps the antimatter suspended inside the trap.  When we quench the magnet (stop the current flow through the copper wire), the antimatter is free to move about, eventually annihilating with the regular matter that makes up the walls of the atom trap.  The particles that are created in the annihilation, namely pions, are monitored by a three-layer silicon detector.  We use the “hits” recorded by the detectors to reconstruct the tracks of the pions and find where the matter-antimatter annihilation took place, kind of like playing “connect the dots.”  Much of my graduate physics research will be writing and using software to find the vertices of these annihilations with as much certainty as possible.

Even without free beer, it’s been incredible working on the ALPHA-2 experiment, which is probably the best antimatter experiment in the world.  Don’t believe me?  You can check out the Carlsberg Foundation’s post, “Probably the Best Antimatter Experiment in the World“.  Cheers!