Popping the Science Bubble: Antimatter and dark matter

Learn about cutting-edge research happening at UC Berkeley, directly from the scientists themselves. Join Popping the Science Bubble in the second floor Mystery Room or join us virtually on Zoom: http://bit.ly/PtSBBerkeley (register at the link).

This month's presentations will be:

Searching for Dark Matter: Axions! - Shreya Puranam, Physics

Only 15% of the matter in the universe is the matter that makes us up (baryonic matter). We refer to the other 85% as dark matter. While we have known about the existence of dark matter through observations of galaxy motion since the mid 1900's, we have yet to directly detect and determine what makes it up. One compelling candidate that I search for is a particle called the axion. During this talk, I will show why we know dark matter must exist, why the axion is a good candidate, and how we actually search for it.

Where Did All the Antimatter Go? - Charlie Hultquist, Physics

We're used to regular matter -- a positively charged nucleus surrounded by negatively charged electrons. Antimatter is the reverse -- a negative nucleus surrounded by positive electrons (positrons). We believe that just after the Big Bang, equal amounts of matter and antimatter were present in the universe. In contrast, today's universe is filled with an abundance of matter. To understand where all this antimatter went, we use particle accelerators to recreate conditions in the early universe and look for matter-antimatter asymmetric processes.