The Power of Antimatter
Dr. Marcela Carena
Fermilab and University of Chicago
Thursday, May 21, 2009 at 8 p.m. - Tickets $5
Presented by Fermilab Lecture Series and the Fermilab Office of Communications as part of Angels and Demons Lecture Nights: The Science Revealed.
In Dan Brown's bestselling book, Angels & Demons, the world of high energy physics plays a critical role in mystery, bringing the work done at CERN and Fermilab to a new level of public awareness. In conjunction with the release of the major motion picture starring Tom Hanks, Fermilab is coordinating lectures across the country to help explain the physics of Angels & Demons in an endeavor titled Angels & Demons Lecture Nights: The Science Revealed. Join us on Thursday, May 21, 2009 as Dr. Marcela Carena presents The Power of Antimatter as part of this series in Fermilab's Ramsey Auditorium at 8 p.m.
The physics at the heart of Angels & Demons calls attention to what happens when matter and antimatter meet. Antimatter is part of our universe, yet it is scarce in all the regions we have explored. We find it in cosmic rays striking the Earth's atmosphere and in radioactive decays of heavy elements. We can create antimatter at high energy particle accelerators. In fact, Fermilab has the largest source of proton antimatter in the world. When antimatter meets its matter counterpart, it annihilates into a burst of pure energy. Antimatter has become the fuel of spectacular science fiction, but antimatter is also a science fact with amazing medical and industrial applications. It is nature's ultimate clean energy source and encompasses mysteries still to be revealed.
Marcela Carena is a senior scientist at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, and a professor in the physics department and the Enrico Fermi Institute at the University of Chicago. She received her Diploma in Physics from the Instituto Balseiro of Bariloche,Argentina, and her Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Hamburg in 1989. She was elected a Fellow of the American Physical Society in 2002. Carena is a theoretical particle physicist working at the frontiers of physics beyond the Standard Model. Her research focuses on explaining the three mysteries of matter: the generation of mass of all the known fundamental particles, the origin of dark matter and the matter-antimatter imbalance of the universe. She has explored the possible connections between Higgs physics, supersymmetry, unification and dark matter as well as theories with extra dimensions of space to explain the hierarchies of mass scales in Nature. She developed a leading model to explain the matter-antimatter asymmetry observed in the universe that will be tested at the CERN Large Hadron Collider. Carena has worked closely with experimental physicists at the LEP experiments at CERN and the Tevatron experiments at Fermilab, creating and implementing strategies for testing new physics ideas at these colliders.
