Researchers at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), in an international collaboration led by Canadians, used microwave spectroscopy – one of the most sensitive techniques for probing the structure of atoms – to manipulate antihydrogen. Their work is published today in the prestigious journal, Nature.

Hydrogen is considered the fundamental building block of physics; by comparing it with its antimatter counterpart, scientists hope to answer a crucial question: if antimatter and matter were created in equal amounts during the Big Bang, where did all the antimatter go?

żě˛ĄĘÓƵ physics graduate students Chanpreet Amole and Andrea Capra worked on the experiment and are co-authors on the Nature paper, along with their supervisor, Professor Scott Menary. The collaboration, dubbed ALPHA (Antihydrogen Laser Physics Apparatus experiment), includes scientists from Canada, Brazil, Denmark, Israel, Sweden, the UK and the US. Five Canadian institutions are represented: University of Calgary, University of British Columbia, Simon Fraser University, żě˛ĄĘÓƵ and TRIUMF, Canada’s national particle and nuclear physics lab.

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Amole and Capra logged 50-hour weeks at CERN in Geneva, preparing the antihydrogen sample and assisting with measurements.

“Every day was a learning experience,” says Amole. “At CERN, you get to work with some of the top minds in the world. Many times, [one of the scientists] would casually walk in and strike up a conversation on some very complex, yet interesting physics phenomenon that would just blow your mind.”

The experiment involved confining anti-atoms in a magnetic trap and irradiating them with microwaves. Precise tuning of the microwave frequency and magnetic field enabled researchers to hit an internal resonance that made atoms literally jump out of the trap and reveal information about their properties. Researchers at SFU designed the apparatus for this latest experiment, working closely with PhD candidates Mohammad Ashkezari of SFU and Tim Friesen from the University of Calgary. Meanwhile, researchers from the Vancouver-based TRIUMF laboratory and żě˛ĄĘÓƵ teased faint signals from a sophisticated detector system, pinpointing matter-antimatter annihilation events.

Menary, professor in York’s Department of Physics & Astronomy, , says the current experiment represents the collaboration’s biggest milestone to date.

“It was a scientific tour de force just to trap the antihydrogen atoms. Now we’re actually doing physics with them. This, in my mind, is an even bigger achievement,” he says.

ALPHA-Canada researchers played a key role in two other recent antimatter milestones: in November 2010, ALPHA scientists successfully trapped antihydrogen atoms for the first time, and in June 2011, they demonstrated they could hold on to them for 1,000 seconds.

“For decades, scientists have wanted to study the intrinsic properties of antimatter atoms in the hope of finding clues that might help answer fundamental questions about our universe,” says lead author Mike Hayden, physicist with SFU. “In the middle of the last century, physicists were developing and using microwave techniques to study ordinary atoms like hydrogen. Now, 60 or 70 years down the road, we have just witnessed the first-ever microwave interactions with an anti-atom.”

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Environmental studies PhD candidate Andrew Mark knows what’s it’s like to have a long commute to campus, but he tries to use this time productively by thinking about and listening to podcasts.

In fact, he likes podcasts so much, he and a fellow student have created a podcast series he hopes other York commuters will find intriguing and thought-provoking.

This week, Mark and Amanda Di Battista, also an environmental studies PhD candidate at York, will launch CoHearence, a new podcast series exploring the connections between the environment and history and culture.

The first episode will explore mourning, loss and the environment 

On Thursday, Feb. 9, York’s Faculty of Environmental Studies (FES) will host a screening and discussion based on the first episode of CoHearence as part of the FES Lecture Series at 12:45pm at 141 Health, Nursing & Environmental Studies building. Mark and Di Battista, along with other participants from the episode, will be on hand for a Q&A period.

Funded by (Network in Canadian History & Environment) and the Faculty of Environmental Studies (FES), CoHearence is a six-part, monthly audio program free to the general public. Part one of the pilot podcast is “Melancholy, Mourning and Environmental Thought: Making Loss the Centre” and it looks at the loss involved in today’s changing environment.

Cohearance will also look at protests and the environment

For anyone not familiar with podcasts, they are similar to radio broadcasts with a difference in the delivery system. Instead of tuning in via radio, listeners download episodes digitally and listen to them through a computer or personal media device, such as an iPod or cellphone. “We think [podcasting] is ideally suited to talking about complex environmental issues,” says Di Battista. Mark agrees, saying “We hope this medium can create a new venue for information dissemination, beyond the written word, the lecture, the conference or an advising session.”

Di Battista says her goal in creating CoHearence is to “facilitate interesting discussion about the relationship between culture and environment. We work really hard to make each episode interesting both to those within the academy and the general public.”

Mark hopes the project will also reach an audience outside of the University. “Our primary objective is to improve the interdisciplinary discussion happening within our Faculty. We can [also] create narratives that are engaging to people outside of our community. For example, not only does our Faculty have theoretical ideas about the G20 protests, but we also have lived knowledge of those events.”

Each podcast episode will highlight current FES research. Di Battista says the reason for choosing melancholy and mourning as the topic for the first podcast is that “in the wake of the huge amount of environmental loss we talk, teach and learn about each day here in [FES], thinking about the ways that we might deal with the grief and anger that come out of those experiences seemed like a great place to start.”

Subsequent episodes will address a range of topics, including food justice, protest and resistance, and even highlights from the held last October at the Gladstone Hotel.

Di Battista and Mark hope that series will endure on the airwaves for a long time. To help ensure this, they are offering workshops on podcasting through the (CAP) program so future generations of FES students may continue to produce CoHearence. “People will discover and rediscover the series as a document of our times,” says Mark. “They might listen to our shows to hear about the topics or merely to come to know the people we interview better.”

CoHearence is available now on as a part of Sean Kheraj’s established podcast called Nature’s Past. It is also available on the website, which currently features a short preview video.

Republished courtesy of YFile– żě˛ĄĘÓƵ’s daily e-bulletin.

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Led by Professor Colin Coates (left), Canada Research Chair in Canadian Cultural Landscapes and professor of Canadian Studies at Glendon College, the project is expected to cast light on the impacts of an earlier period of economic “globalization” as a way of better understanding the challenges of current practices. It is one of eight projects across Canada that has been granted funding in the 2011 Digging into Data Challenge.

Fourteen teams representing Canada, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom and the United States have been awarded grants to investigate how computational techniques can be applied to “big data” to change the nature of humanities and social sciences research. Each team represents collaborations among scholars, scientists and librarians from leading universities worldwide.

Coates, who is also the director of the Robarts Centre for Canadian Studies at York, is one of the principal investigators on the project titled Trading Consequences, which received $125,000 in funding. The project will examine the economic and environmental consequences of commodity trading during the 19th century and employs information extraction techniques to study large corpora of digitized documents from the 19th century. This innovative digital resource will allow historians to discover novel patterns and to explore new hypotheses through structured query and a variety of visualization tools.

"Our team of environmental historians is excited to be partners with the Universities of Edinburgh and St. Andrews in the Trading Consequences project. Canadian economic development has historically been defined by commodity flows, and it is important to understand the environmental impacts of this commerce in the past, just as it is today. The focus on Canadian data will test the techniques created through this collaborative project for mapping the scope and impact of international trade in the 19th century," said Coates.

“York is proud to receive recognition in the 2011 Digging into Data Challenge,” said Robert Haché, York’s vice-president research & innovation. “These important research projects advance knowledge as researchers work collaboratively and internationally to find new ways to analyze, search for and store data using digital and electronic technologies.”

“The Digging into Data Challenge is an international initiative that enables Canadian researchers to take advantage of the huge digital resources now available and to develop close partnerships with overseas universities,” said Chad Gaffield, president of the Social Sciences & Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC). “These exciting projects cross both disciplines and national borders; they lead to new insights into human thought and behaviour.”

The successful cohort of projects received a total of nearly $5 million in funding from eight international research funding agencies. SSHRC’s contribution of $869,117 will support Canadian researchers from eight of the fourteen teams.  

For more information, visit the Ěý·É±đ˛ú˛őľ±łŮ±đ.

Republished courtesy of YFile– żě˛ĄĘÓƵ’s daily e-bulletin.

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