Dr Muhammed Sameed, Life Member of KSS: An Integral Part of the Recent Groundbreaking Experiment on Antimatter at CERN

We congratulate Dr Muhammed Sameed, Life Member of Khwarizmi Science Society and a Pakistani physicist working at CERN, Switzerland, and his ALPHA experiment team members for achieving the groundbreaking laser cooling of anti-hydrogen atoms and getting featured on the cover of Nature magazine, issue April 2021! This is the first time in history that laser-cooling, i.e., the slowing of movement in atoms with the use of photons, has been successfully applied to antimatter, the oppositely charged counterpart to matter.

Dr Muhammed Sameed and his team members deep-freezed magnetically trapped atoms of anti-hydrogen (the antimatter atom consisting of an antiproton and a positron) to 0.012 degree Kelvins above absolute zero, slowed down their movement by almost 10 times, and performed hyper-fine spitting measurement on the atoms, in carefully optimized laboratory conditions. This technique of controlling antimatter by overcoming the numerous challenges associated with producing, trapping, and measuring anti-matter, has far-reaching implications as it paves the way for performing precise experiments with antimatter particles, observe their interaction with gravitational field, and provide answers to big questions such as why matter came to dominate our universe after the Big Bang.

This successful demonstration by Dr Muhammed Sameed and his fellow ALPHA team members, could perhaps lead to the discovery to a whole new exciting field of physics! Read the research publication here.