Credit: Lance Hayashida/Caltech
By the laws of physics, you shouldn’t exist.
Every time the universe creates matter, it creates an equal amount of antimatter—yet our cosmos is made almost entirely of matter. Caltech’s Nick Hutzler believes the answer might be hiding in molecules.
On Wednesday, Oct. 22, Hutzler will explain how his experiments could reveal these fundamental forces during his Watson Lecture, “Molecules, Mysteries, and the Matter of Existence.” The free public talk begins at 7:30 p.m. in Beckman Auditorium.
“But there’s a really big caveat to that picture, which is that whenever you create particles, whenever you create matter out of energy, you also create antimatter in equal amounts,” Hutzler explained. “But there is no antimatter freely available in the universe.”
Hutzler, an assistant professor of physics at Caltech, searches for answers by studying molecules with extraordinary precision. His experiments aim to detect new particles or forces by observing tiny violations in fundamental symmetries.
“Whatever it was that created matter over antimatter could be some new particle or some new force or some new interaction or something,” Hutzler said. “That process leaves a signature on regular matter.”
During his Ph.D. research at Harvard, Hutzler helped set a groundbreaking limit on the electron electric dipole moment using thorium monoxide molecules—a measurement precise enough to detect whether a basketball had a lopsided weight distribution of less than a single atom.
Activities and music begin at 6 p.m., with doors opening at 7 p.m. A recording will be available on Caltech’s YouTube channel.
Watson Lecture Nick Hutzler will run on Wednesday, Oct. 22, at 6 p.m. for activities and music, 7 p.m. for doors open and 7:30 p.m. for the lecture and Q&A. Beckman Auditorium, 332 S. Michigan Ave., in Pasadena. For more call (626) 395-4652 or visit https://events.caltech.edu/calendar/watson-lecture-nick-hutzler. Tickets: Free.
