It's all a matter of anti-matter

Professor Gerald Gabrielse

Professor Gerald Gabrielse, Professor of Physics at Harvard University, attended the winter meeting of the Institute of Physics at DCU this week which was held by the 'Atoms, Molecules and their Interactions Group' (AMIG). The university is particularly delighted that Gerald Gabrielse, Professor of Physics at Harvard University, agreed to accept the invitation as he is a most sought-after speaker world-wide.

Gerald Gabrielse is a physicist of outstanding reputation; not only is he the Professor of Physics at one of the world's leading universities, but he also leads the international ATRAP collaboration whose goal is accurate laser spectroscopy with trapped antihydrogen atoms. Despite his international research involvement, most of his experiments are carried out at Harvard university and include a variety of atomic, optical, elementary particle, plasma and low temperature physics experiments. His collaborative research programme has succeeded in making and studying the simplest anti-atom, antihydrogen (antiproton and positron) for the first time. This has involved as much engineering as scientific hurdles.

Professor Gerald Gabrielse, Dr John Costello and Prof Bob McCullough, Chairman of Institute of Physics - AMIG

According to John Costello of the DCU School of Physics, "the work has enormous significance as one can now perform some very fundamental tests to check whether the anti-matter world is exactly the same as the matter world". He goes on to say that "you can't bottle stuff - you'd need an antimatter gas canister to hold it!".

On a more serious note, this research is giving physics researchers the opportunity to perform fundamental tests to check whether the anti-matter world is exactly the same as the matter world, which will bring about one of the great scientific breakthroughs of our time.