No Hard Feelings

Though both research groups worked to be the first to achieve a shared goal, the competition was not clouded with animosity, Variola says.

“We have quite a gentlemanly concurrence,” he says. “This is what I would call ‘sane competition.’”

“There certainly is rivalry, but there is no bad feeling between the two groups,” says Paul Oxley, one of two Harvard graduate students who worked in the Geneva lab. “They do their experiments within 20 feet of our

experiments.”

According to Variola, the close proximity of the experimenters is unusual.

“It’s not so common in physics to have two experiments running on the same subject…two different experiments with the same setup and the same machine,” Variola says.

But for now, the competition is on hold.

The work in Geneva can go on for only six months per year because of required maintainance work on the massive machines. For now, the competition is frozen. The teams will start work again in May.

When ATRAP members are not working in at CERN alongside ATHENA, they are at Harvard, creating, slowing, and studying positrons.

“We store millions of positrons in a little container,” says Gabrielse.

But he must travel to Geneva to use the equipment that actually brings together anti-protons and positrons.

For the past two years, Gabrielse had been making once-a-week trips to Geneva to conduct research.

He still teaches classes, answering students’ questions by e-mail. Often, he says, students do not realize he answers their questions from thousands of miles away.

From Making to Studying