New spokesperson elected for AEgIS antimatter experiment
Ruggero Caravita, a physicist at the Trento Institute for Fundamental Physics and Applications of Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare, has been elected as the new spokesperson for the AEgIS antimatter experiment at AVA partner institution CERN. He studied for his PhD at the University of Genova and at CERN, and then worked at CERN as a Marie Curie Fellow. He has been involved in AEgIS activities for over 8 years, including serving as the Physics Coordinator in the years before the election.
The AEgIS experiment is one of several ongoing experiments at CERN that are investigating the properties of antimatter and the fundamental laws of physics. The results of these experiments could have important implications for our understanding of the universe and the nature of matter itself.
The aim of the AEgIS experiment is to measure the gravitational free-fall of antimatter atoms for the first time. This groundbreaking experiment will help scientists to better understand the behavior of antimatter and could lead to new discoveries in fundamental physics. Ruggero is excited to lead the AEgIS team in this ambitious endeavor and is confident that the experiment will yield important results in the upcoming years.
The AEgIS experiment uses a beam of antihydrogen atoms, which are the antimatter counterpart of hydrogen atoms, to test the equivalence principle, one of the fundamental principles of Einstein's theory of general relativity. The experiment will measure the gravitational acceleration of antihydrogen atoms to an unprecedented accuracy and thus test whether antimatter falls at the same rate as matter in a gravitational field.