Antihydrogen named Breakthrough of the Year for 2010

Physics World has awarded the 2010 Breakthrough of the Year to two international teams of physicists at CERN, who have created new ways of controlling antiatoms of hydrogen.

The ALPHA collaboration (including a number of poeple associated with UBC) announced its findings in late November, which involved trapping 38 antihydrogen atoms (an antielectron orbiting an antiproton) for about 170 ms. This is long enough to measure their spectroscopic properties in detail, which the team hopes to do in 2011.

Just weeks later, the ASACUSA group at CERN announced that it had made a major breakthrough towards creating a beam of antihydrogen that is suitable for spectroscopic studies.

The people associated with UBC that are working with the ALPHA team include professor emeritus Walter Hardy, Phd student Andrea Gutierrez, and a former M.Sc. student, Sarah Self El Nasr. Also contributing are former students Michael Hayden, now a professor at SFU and Makoto C. Fujiwara, who is the ALPHA-Canada Spokesperson & a researcher at TRIUMF.

See the complete story at PhysicsWorld.com