• Question: Can you guys build a machine?

    Asked by anon-232371 to Mark, Liam, Laura, Kasia, Gina on 18 Nov 2019.
    • Photo: Mark Johnson

      Mark Johnson answered on 18 Nov 2019:

      I helped to build a new machine for a physics experiment last year! I work on a project called ALPHA-g, which aims to find out whether antimatter (a rare type of subatomic particle) falls up or down in Earth’s gravity.

      To make our measurements, we need a huge machine where we can drop antimatter and then detect which direction it has fallen in. After years of planning, we built the main part of our experiment last year. The central part of our machine operates at -269 °C, and contains a vacuum about as empty as outer space!

      There’s more information (and pictures of our machine) here: https://home.cern/news/news/experiments/new-antimatter-gravity-experiments-begin-cern

    • Photo: Laura Sinclair

      Laura Sinclair answered on 19 Nov 2019:

      The closet I can think of is that I have helped on big projects with machine like stuff. In nuclear physics we need to detect alpha, beta, or gamma rays. We need to produce beams, control the beams with magnets, and then we need detectors hooked up to electronics and computers to interpret what we have detected.

    • Photo: Liam Gaffney

      Liam Gaffney answered on 20 Nov 2019:

      Last year we finished a project to build a big nuclear reaction chamber that used a recycled MRI machine from a hospital. Inside the MRI machine is a giant magnet that is really useful for bending particles spat out from the reactions. Our new machine could then detect these particles and work out their energy and where they came from, a bit like a big nuclear camera.

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