Makoto Fujiwara

The prize!

Of the three Nobel winners in physics just announced, two of them have strong relevance to my research on antihydrogen. Ted Haensch and John Hall shared the prize for the invention of the optical frequency comb. This device literally revolutionized the field of precision optical spectroscopy.

Ted’s contributions to laser physics are quite enormous, and the frequency comb is just one last addition to his list of achievements. We all had expected he is going to win the prize one day for one reason or another. Below is a plot I always use in my talks on antihydrogen, which I call “Haensch Plot”, where the evolution of the precision in optical spectroscopy of atomic hydrogen is plotted against the year. Note the logarithmic scale! The last point in 2000 is due to his invention of the frequency comb.

Ted works on one of the antihydrogen experiments at CERN called ATRAP. On the other hand, one of my colleagues in our Canadian group of the Project ALPHA, David Jones of University of British Columbia, is the one who built the first frequency comb with John Hall, before the Haensch group.

Of course, this technique will be useful for the future antihydrogen spectroscopy, as mentioned in the background materials by Nobel Foundation: http://nobelprize.org/physics/laureates/2005/info.pdf

I suspect David surely will be attending the ceremony (and the parties!) in Stockholm in December.

Congratulations to all!

Summer? What summer??

I live two blocks from a very nice beach. Last Sunday, I went down to the beach to sun bathe for the first time this summer. But guess what, the summer is gone in Vancouver! It was too cold and windy to stay on a beach for more than half an hour!

It’s been a long time since my last posting. Basically, I’ve been swamped by efforts to establish a Canadian group and secure funding for participating in an antihydrogen experiment, the ALPHA Project. I believe we have put together a strong group of Canadian scientists, which can make crucial contributions to the project. We’ll know the results of our funding application in a couple of months. I hope my entire summer’s effort will be paid off in the end.

 

Not exactly a 10 minute man

This is of course about conference talks.

I was at American Physical Society Meeting of Northwest Division last week. As Gordon Watts writes, 10 minute talks are very hard. I had been coaching our student Ryan Bayes on his talk. He did a great job. His talk was well practiced, well organized, and well executed. My talk, on the contrary, gave him an example of how not to give a 10 minute talk! Too much materials, not enough practice, going over time! I'm sure Gordon is talking about me when he writes:

The great thing to do is watch people's expressions when they get the 2 minute warning.

I was barely finishing the introduction when I got the 2 minute warning! Well at least, this time my nose did not bleed few minutes before my talk.

Gordon did give a nice talk. In fact, my colleague Art Olin and I cornered him afterwords to learn more about his decision tree analysis. We would like to invite him to TRIUMF to give a seminar when he has a new result on single top production.

It was nice to meet another Qantum Diarist in person. I hope to meet more of them in the future. By the way, I'm totally impressed that Gordon has written 8 postings since the APS conference! When does he find the time with all other stuff he's doing???

Victoria APS meeting

Tomorrow, I'm leaving for Victoria, BC (see pic below), for American Physical Society meeting of North West section. My colleague Art Olin is giving a TWIST talk in Nuclear Physics session, and our student Ryan Bayes, and I are giving talks on Particle Physics session. Ryan's talking about his search for lepton flavor violating rare decay of muons, and I'm giving a usual antihydrogen talk. It promises to an interesting conference.

It looks like a QDer Gordon Watts is also giving a talk at the meeting. I'm looking forward to seeing him in person. I'll report on our encounter.

Searching for Nature's Right Hand

Our TWIST collaboration (TRIUMF Weak Intearaction Symmetry Test) has recently repored our first physics results. An article just appeared in this month's CERN Courier.  Here is our PR blurb:

      

Elementary particles such as electrons are labeled as either "right-handed" or "left-handed".  A surprising observation is that only left-handed particles seem to feel the weak nuclear force, whereas left- and right-handed particles feel the other fundamental forces equally. This difference, called parity violation, was predicted and observed in the 1950's, and led to a Nobel Prize.  It is now a cornerstone of the modern Standard Model of subatomic physics.  However, there are strong reasons to believe that this Standard Model is incomplete.  "Left-right symmetric" theories explain parity violation by assuming that right-handed particles also respond to the weak force, but we would need to be in a much hotter world - with a temperature well above 10¹⁵ degrees - for this to be obvious. The idea is that in the early Universe, the weak force was left-right symmetric, but in the course of the evolution of the Universe, the right-handed interaction is somehow "frozen".

The TWIST Collaboration is testing these theories with high-precision measurements of the decay of the muon, a particle that appears identical to an electron in all regards except that it is heavier. The Collaboration has just reported the first improvement since 1966 in the measurement of the energy spectrum of positrons produced in muon decay. The result obtained so far agrees with the Standard Model predictions, and sets stringent new constraints to the left-right symmetric theories. The TWIST Collaboration will continue its effort to further scrutinize the Standard Model and its extensions, with yet higher precisions, as we seek to understand the origin of the left-right asymmetry in Nature.

The results are published in:

• J.R. Musser et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 94, 101805 (2005)
• A. Gaponenko et al. Phys. Rev. D 71, 071101(R) (2005)

and they form the basis of two Ph.D. theses for Jim Musser and Andrei Gaponenko.

For more information, see the TWIST Experiment Website.

Dismantling ATHENA, cleaing the way for ALPHA

At CERN, we are dismantling the ATHENA (AntTiHydrogEN Apparatus) experiment, a successful project which produced the first cold atoms of antihydrogen. ATHENA completed the data collection in the end of 2004, and some of us former ATHENA members are development a new experiment, ALPHA (Antihydrogen Laser PHysics Apparatus) experiment.

 

During my last visit to CERN, I helped disassemble cables. ATHENA was a small scale experiment, but we still had hundreds of cables running between the experimental apparatus and from the experimental area to the control room. We have to clear all the cables, together with other apparatus, in order to make room for ALPHA. It gave me a bit of sentimental feeling, since one of the first things I did as a new postdoc in ATHENA in 1999 was to install the cables for external annihilation detectors. CERN actually has a department to install cables for the experimenters, but in order to save the money, we did it ourselves. (Physicists are always cheapter than techinicians!) Back then when we were building the experiment, we hadn't faintest ideas whether we could actually succeed in making antihydrogen, let alone be competitive with our competitors, and make the top physics news of Year 2002. It’s a bit pity that we have to dismantle all this. But we must move on, in order to make progress. I hope that, several years from now, I can look back the present time with similar good memories.

Most Colorful Lecture

(It's 4:00 in the morning, and I still have so much to do before I can leave for Liverpool later today, but I'm obviously procrastinating by blogging. )

Last week, I gave a seminar to atomic/molecular/optics physicists at UBC.  My talks are usually colorful, with lots of animations and movies in my power point file, but this one was done in particularly colorful manner; My nose started bleeding few minuets before the talk starts!!!

According to my C.V. I had given 46 invited talks at seminars/colloquia and conferences in my career by then, but the 47th one was by far in the worst condition. I had been in bed, sick with flu for nearly a week. And my nose adding injury to the insult. I discovered myself feeling completely powerless, faced with involuntary action of my body.  In the end, I had to put a piece of Kleenex under my upper lip inside my mouth (at suggesting of my colleague Glen), which of course looked totally goofy. I'm glad this did not happen for my job interview.

The following day, I went to see a doctor for the first time in long time, and the antibiotics he gave me cured my illness immediately. Wonder of modern medicine. I should have gone to see him long ago.

Last day of school: It's party time!

For students, that is.

Every year, on the last day of classes, Arts Undergraduate Society at Univ. of British Columbia organizes an outdoor concert at UBC Stadium, called Arts County Fair. This is a huge party. According to the organizers:

Arts County Fair is the largest student-run event in Canada.

It combines five amazing bands, 500 kegs of beer, 6000 litres of cider and 15,000 people to produce what the organizers call "an experiment in crowd control."

Some photos from previous years:

 

Obviously, their alcohol counts do not include the consumptions before the Fair. When I was walking on campus today, I saw many young people, considerable intoxicated, heading for the Stadium.

I must admit, when I was a student here, I was one of those. I used go there almost every year, sometimes helping serve alcohol on the "one for you one for me" basis, like this:

 

 

You don't see too many profs at Fair, but there are few cool exceptions. In fact, my friend Andre actually told me when I got a  job here last fall, "I guess that means that Harvey won't be the only prof that goes to the Arts County Fair, huh?"

Unfortunately, I could not join Harvy today; I'm leaving for Liverpool and CERN tomorrow, and totally swamped with work. Definitely next year, I hope I will be out there. Perhaps serving you alcohol.

 

 

 

 

Show me the $$$ (CDN)!

I learned recently that my grant proposal “Production and Spectroscopy of Cold Antihydrogen” was funded by the NSERC, the Canadian funding agency for scientific research. It was a lot of paper work, so I’m glad it paid off. In fact, as a TRIUMF Research Scientist, getting an external funding is a condition for doing independent research. So this allows me to now officially participate in antihydrogen research at CERN.

Also, my other project, TWIST, received continuation of the funding for anther two years. Neither projects received as much as we had asked for, but given the apparently extremely tough competition this year (we had been warmed many times by the officials), I can’t complain.

 
So that was the good news. The bad news is I’m starting to prepare for yet another research grant, an even bigger one. This is bad, because I myself get to spend less and less time doing real physics (and less time for writing Quantum Diaries!). But somebody’s got to do the paper work, otherwise nothing will happen. It’s part of the job. Oh well…

Time Changes

Can someone explain to me why the time changes to the day light saving time is different between Europe and North America? My colleague from Berkeley and I, both on the Pacific Time missed the first hour of the weekly video meeting for the Project ALPHA today. Can't they just decide one way or another?? Of course, in Japan, there is no day light saving time, adding to the confusion of video meetings...