Robicheaux part of team experimenting on antimatter
A physics professor who grew up in Destrehan and was part of a group that made a huge scientific breakthrough last year, is now closer to unlocking a mystery that could change the basic understanding of the universe.
Last year, Francis Robicheaux and 16 other researchers at CERN, a Geneva-based particle physics laboratory, captured antimatter atoms for the first time. The discovery was important because most scientists believe that when the universe was created, matter and antimatter were produced in equal amounts.
But because our world is made up of matter, antimatter seems to have disappeared.
According to Space.com, antimatter has tremendous energy potential if it could ever be harnessed. A solar flare in July 2002 created about a pound of antimatter, according to new NASA-led research. That’s enough to power the United States for two days.
When the scientists, called the ALPHA group, first captured antimatter, they were only able to hold it for about a tenth of a second. Recently it was announced that they can now capture antimatter for more than 15 minutes.
“This is incredibly important,” Robicheaux said. “If you can’t hold onto them for long, then the measurements that you can do with them are so limited as to be almost worthless.”
Before the ALPHA group’s breakthrough, antimatter had only existed on paper, though it has made several appearances in science fiction. In “Star Trek,” the energy generated when matter and antimatter collided sent the Starship Enterprise into time-warping speeds. In “Angels and Demons,” a movie starring Tom Hanks, a secret society is bent on destroying Vatican City by using an antimatter bomb.
For Robicheaux, getting the chance to study antimatter is something he could have only dreamed of.
Robicheaux’s love of physics first took root in Destrehan. He spent most of his early years in the area and attended St. Charles Borromeo in Destrehan before heading to St. Charles Catholic.
“St. Charles High School moved from Destrehan to LaPlace when I was a freshman, so we were the first class to go all four years in LaPlace,” Robicheaux said. “Destrehan was a lot less populated then. I remember hunting in spots that now have houses.”
Robicheaux said he drifted into physics because both of his parents were math teachers. His father, Frank, taught at Destrehan High School, while his mother, Laura, taught at the junior high.
“I sort of had a knack for math and when I got to high school one of the more interesting classes was physics,” Robicheaux said. “Physics is about how the universe works and I thought it was cool that you could understand a lot of the details.
“It was even more interesting that not everything was known. Almost all of the fun as a professional physicist is in understanding something that no one thought of before.”
Eleven years ago, Robicheaux got involved with something that would change his life. He was on sabbatical in Amsterdam when he began performing calculations on antimatter. Because of Robicheaux’s experience in simulating how the antihydrogen atom (antimatter) formed, he was asked to join the ALPHA collaboration, and the group has spent the last five years trying to capture antimatter.
After last year’s huge breakthrough, Robicheaux knew it was only a matter of time before the group would be able to capture the antihydrogen atom for much longer than was believed possible.
“I wasn’t surprised that we were able to do it quickly, but I was surprised at how long our final result was,” Robicheaux said. “Actually, we still haven’t measured how long we could hold the antihydrogen if we wanted to. We only did measurements out to 15 minutes because there is nothing we want to do with them that will require a longer time.”
Antimatter was first predicted in 1931 by Paul Dirac, who theorized that antimatter is ordinary matter in reverse. But antimatter has been difficult to capture because matter destroys it on contact.
“So you have to capture the antihydrogen without letting anything touch it,” Robicheaux said. “We can capture them using electric and magnetic forces.”
But it’s not as easy as it sounds.
To capture the antimatter, the group used a hollow tube that is about two inches wide and four feet long, which also happens to be an extremely high vacuum. The cylinder is cooled to about -449 degrees Fahrenheit and is surrounded with superconducting wires that make extremely large magnetic fields with a current that runs through them.
“It is the magnetic field which directs the motion of the antihydrogen and prevents it from hitting the wall,” Robicheaux said. “The difficulty is that we are holding the antihydrogen atom using magnetic forces and these forces are incredibly weak.”
The group has now trapped more than 300 antihydrogen atoms and will try to measure the magnetic property of the antihydrogen.
“All magnets have a north and a south pole and antihydrogen is not different,” he said. “We can send microwaves down the trap to try to flip the poles, but because the microwaves we send will be weak it takes a long time to flip them.”
The ALPHA group will then move on to a second experiment where they will try to measure the electric properties of antihydrogen.
“Very fundamental theories of physics predict that hydrogen and antihydrogen should have exactly the same electric and magnetic properties,” Robicheaux said. “If we measure a difference, no matter how small, that difference would fundamentally change our basic understanding of the universe.”
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