Vancouver’s Railway Club at 579 Dunsmuic St. is welcoming this month’s Café Scientifique tonight, April 19, 2011, at 7:30 pm. The meeting is held in a backroom and last month’s meeting was SRO (standing room only). April 2011’s speaker is Andrea Gutierrez, a PhD student at TRIUMF, a subatomic physics laboratory, located at the University of British Columbia. From the announcement,

Let’s trap antimatter! An overview of how it is done and its applications.

Our world is made of matter: protons, neutrons and electrons. Each of these particles has a “twin” particle (antiprotons, antineutrons and antielectrons) that looks just like a mirror image of it, with the same mass but opposite charge. When matter gets close enough to antimatter, they both disappear in a puff of energy. To trap antimatter it is fundamental to keep it away from matter, which is what makes it a really challenging task. Last November, we were able to catch cold antihydrogen for the first time (antiatoms composed of an antiproton and an antielectron) at ALPHA (Antihydrogen Laser PHysics Apparatus). In this talk, we will discuss how to produce, trap and detect antihydrogen!

According to the announcement, this project was ranked as the #1 breakthough in 2010 by Physics World journal.