Hi – welcome to my web page!
After many years of slinging protons around the McGill University cyclotron (and sinking pints at McGill’s Thomson House grad pub) I was hired by France’s CNRS to pursue real science. This I attempt by developing ion traps for weighing short-lived atomic nuclei (with ISOLTRAP at CERN and TITAN at TRIUMF) and dropping antimatter (with GBAR, also at CERN), linking the infinitely large and small.
The mass of an atom tells us lots about its structure (via the binding energy, from Einstein’s E = mc2) and is interesting for related things like the cooking of elements inside stars and the interplay of quarks inside the nucleus. For more on mass measurements with radioactive isotopes, see the ISOLTRAP website at CERN.
As for antimatter, who could resist such a cool subject ?! With GBAR we are working on fabricating an antimatter ion (an antiproton with two positrons) so it can be cooled, neutralized with (almost) zero velocity, and dropped. This way we aim to test the Equivalence Principle of General Relativity (yes, Einstein again !). For the latest, see the GBAR website at CERN.
Postal address :
Université Paris-Saclay
IJCLab – Batiment 108 – Bureau J023 / Lab J030-1
15, rue Georges Clémenceau
91405 Orsay, France
Research Activities :
- nuclear mass measurements with ISOLTRAP at ISOLDE
- testing Einstein’s Equivalence Principle with antimatter at CERN’s AD
- tinkering with ion manipulation devices
Publication list :
Lien INSPIRE IJCLab
Recent papers :
-
The origin of the elements and other implications of gravitational wave detection for nuclear physics
- Mass measurements of 99–101In challenge ab initio nuclear theory of the nuclide 100Sn
- A pulsed high-voltage decelerator system to deliver low-energy antiprotons
Recent outreach :
- Life cycle of a neutron star (TED Ed)
- Where does gold come from (TED Ed)
- From the TEDxCERN events of 2015 and 2018
CERN Courier feature articles :
- Exotic Nuclei at ISOLDE (2020)
- Plumbing the depths of neutron stars (2013)
- ISOLDE of the trail of superlatives (2004)
- Spectrometry provides precision for the masses (2001)
Recent Seminar/Colloquia :
- Bordeaux – Nuclear Binding Energy, Stellar Nucleosynthesis, Compact Objects and (anti)gravity
- Université Paris Sorbonne – The GBAR experiment at CERN
- CEA – True Stories of trapped ions
