Activities

Scientists at CERN atom smasher confirm York U physicist’s theories – Toronto Star

Randy Lewis was happy to hear the news, but he was nowhere near surprised. He expected Tuesday’s discovery of two new subatomic particles since he predicted their existence five years ago.“It’s certainly a very nice feeling,” the York University physicist told the Star.“Finding these two shows our experiments, which are very challenging, are being done […]

Seven Canadians Thinking Big in 2014 – Toronto Star

The Toronto Star names York Physics professor Randy Lewis as one of seven Canadians thinking big in 2014: http://www.thestar.com/news/world/2014/12/22/seven_canadians_thinking_big_in_2014.html

Matthew Johnson is co-recipient of third prize in 2014 Buchalter Cosmology Prize Competition

First Annual Buchalter Cosmology Prize Recognizes Innovative Ideas and Discoveries Seattle, WA – January 6, 2015 (9:20 AM PST) – The winners of the 2014 Buchalter Cosmology Prize were announced today at the 225th meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Seattle, Washington. The annual prize, created by Dr. Ari Buchalter in 2014, seeks to […]

Scott Menary is co-recipient of the 2013 Polanyi Prize

York experimental particle physics professor Scott Menary is a co-recipient of the 2013 NSERC John C Polanyi prize. The prize was awarded to the ALPHA-Canada team for its research on antihydrogen. read more…

ALPHA Probes Antimatter Gravity

Physicists have long wondered if the gravitational interaction between antimatter and matter might be different than that between matter and itself. Do atoms made of antimatter, like antihydrogen, fall at a different rate to those made of matter, or might they even fall up — antigravity? There are many arguments that make the case that […]

ALPHA Is #1 Physics Breakthrough Of The Year

Physics World, the international physics magazine produced by the Institute of Physics, has named ALPHA’s recent trapping of antihydrogen as part of the #1 physics breakthrough of 2010, jointly with the ASACUSA Collaboration’s formation of antihydrogen in a ‘cusp’ trap. The complete list of ten breakthroughs from 2010 includes measurements of the atmosphere of an exoplanet 130 light-years […]

Dealing with Data

In the first run of the Large Hadron Collider, almost a billion proton-proton collisions took place every second in the centre of the ATLAS detector. That amounts to enough data to fill 100,000 CDs each second. If you stacked the CDs on top of each other, in a year it would reach the moon four […]

Higgs Into Fermions

The ATLAS experiment released preliminary results on 26 Nov 2013 that show evidence, with a significance of 4.1 standard deviations that the Higgs boson decays to two taus, which are fermions. This is exciting news. But what makes this measurement important?