A high-level visitor from the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) will be on the U of A campus on May 17 to shed light on the physics behind the movie, Angels & Demons.
Dr. Rolf Landua, the head of Education and Public Outreach at CERN is visiting the U of A to give a highly entertaining free public presentation entitled, "Angels and Demons, the Physics Behind the Movie" (CCIS Lecture Theatre 1-430 , 6pm), about the science and the fiction of antimatter, and its place in our universe.
Dr. Landua was a former spokesman for the ALPHA experiment at CERN, which recently succeeded in trapping anti-hydrogen atoms for the first time. He was also the physics adviser to director Ron Howard when Angels & Demons was shot on location at CERN.
The University of Alberta has had a close connection with CERN in Switzerland for the last two decades, says Physics professor Dr. Jim Pinfold, who added that having Dr. Landau speak on campus was a real privilege. "This presentation is sure to be very interesting to a wide range of people," said Dr. Pinfold.
"Over the last two decades a team of University of Alberta physicists, engineers and technicians have made key contributions to the design and construction of the ATLAS experiment," said Pinfold, the founder of the Alberta effort on the Large Hadron Collider and with the ATLAS experiment.
"Our group is now actively searching for evidence of mini black holes, supersymmetry and dark matter; we are also pushing the search window for new physics into the forward region of the ATLAS detector."
On 2 December 2009, CERN approved the LHC's seventh experiment - the Magnetic Monopole and Exotics Detector At the LHC (MoEDAL) - led by the U of A. "With only 30 physicists collaborating, this international experiment is a David compared with the LHC's Goliaths. But MoEDAL has "big science" capabilities that are every bit as revolutionary as the most important LHC discoveries," said Pinfold, spokesperson for MoEDAL. "With major contributions to ATLAS and MoEDAL under its belt, the U of A is very well known at CERN."
Asked to sum up the situation now at CERN, Pinfold replied, "In the last year or so we have gotten the world's largest and most complicated scientific instrument up and running and the LHC continues to make daily progress towards the goal of higher energies and more collisions per second."We have already validated the ATLAS detector by confirming past discoveries and confirmed, from a short heavy-ion run in 2010, that the early universe was a super-hot, super-liquid, quark-gluon soup. We are now knocking at discovery's door and the door is opening.
"The next two years will be exciting and unforgettable time as we enter the door of groundbreaking and revolutionary breakthroughs."