Gabriel Lewis Bridges, Columbia – (GAPS) an Antarctic balloon mission searching for dark matter

Gabriel Lewis Bridges, PhD candidate, Department of Physics, Columbia University

The General Antiparticle Spectrometer: Hunting for Dark Matter from an Antarctic Balloon

THE CLASSROOM WILL BE OPEN FOR THIS EVENT

Join us LIVE in the WAS Classroom for this lecture, featuring our speaker joining us IN PERSON. This event will be live-streamed on YouTube and as a webinar on Zoom, but we’d love to see you in the classroom at the Westport Observatory. As always, the talk will be posted to the Westport Astronomical Society’s YouTube channel afterwards.

Dark matter is one of the greatest mysteries in modern physics. It makes up 84% of the mass of the universe but, despite more than 50 years of attempts, no one has been able to figure out just what it is. The General AntiParticle Spectrometer (GAPS for short) is a new kind of experiment which hopes to be the first to unravel this great mystery.

GAPS is a balloon-borne particle detector which is specifically designed to hunt for low energy anti-particles in cosmic rays. One particular antiparticle, the anti-deuteron, can not be produced by known physics so a detection of one would be a “smoking gun” signature of dark matter. GAPS achieves unprecedented sensitivity to these signals thanks to a novel identification technique based on the formation and decay of exotic atoms (atom for which an electron has been replaced by some other negatively charged particle).

In the winter of 2024 GAPS was assembled at McMurdo station in Antarctica and in the coming winter it will finally be launched on its maiden voyage.

Gabriel is a PhD candidate studying particle astrophysics. His interest in uncovering the dark secrets of the universe came as no surprise to his friends, family, or the public school educators who shaped his path, all of whom bore witness to him discovering video games through the NASA website and spending his Saturdays computing the entropy of plasma waves. When he isn’t lost in programming simulations or integrating Si(Li) detectors into the GAPS experiment, he can sometimes be found mixing craft cocktails – which makes him an asset both in and out of the lab.

Cal’s Corner is TBA