Jeff Martin Colloquium
Fri. Nov. 14 12:30 PM
- Fri. Nov. 14 01:20 PM
Contact: Andrea Wiebe
Location: 3M63
Jeff Martin, Department Chair & Professor, Dept. of Physics, University of Winnipeg
Trapping Neutrons in a Bottle
Neutrons are all around us, but, usually, they are bound inside atomic nuclei. We recently built a neutron source that frees neutrons from nuclei, and slows them down to kinetic energies less than a few hundred nanoelectronvolts. This corresponds to a temperature of 0.003 Kelvin, or a speed of a few m/s. When neutrons are moving that slowly, they can be confined in bottles. We are preparing an experiment using neutrons in a bottle to test the symmetries of nature. A measurement of the neutron's electric dipole moment is our top priority. The electric dipole moment violates CP symmetry, the symmetry relating particles to their antiparticle counterparts. Because of this, our results might shed light on a long-standing mystery: How did the universe come to be dominated by matter, as opposed to being equal parts matter and antimatter? We recently demonstrated that our new neutron source works amazingly well. With one final upgrade, we are likely set a new world record for ultracold neutron production, later this year. This will enable a new era of precision measurements of the fundamental interactions of neutrons.