Louise Heelan, a graduate student at Carleton, is a researcher at CERN ( Photo: Adam Dietrich )
The newly released, high-grossing film Angels and Demons – based on Dan Brown’s novel – has a strong Carleton University connection, graduate student Louise Heelan, explained.
Heelan works at CERN which is home to the largest high-energy particle accelerator in the world: the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).
In the film, CERN is an alleged secret society; while in reality, more than 9,000 scientists and 11 Canadian institutes are involved with the LHC project, according to Heelan.
Research efforts at LHC aim to explore antimatter particles and try to answer key questions like “What are we made of?” and “How were we created?”
But for those who have seen Angels and Demons, the big question is likely “What is antimatter?”
In the movie, antimatter is a dangerous mix of particles that will destroy the Vatican if dropped out of suspension. This story is only partly true, but antimatter is real assured Heelan.
Antimatter contains particles like electrons and protons that are present in regular matter; the difference is that they carry the opposite charge. Antimatter can be very dangerous in large quantities, but as Heelan explained, it is almost impossible to make that much and capture it for use.
“It would take one million years to make 0.5 grams of antimatter,” she said, which is the amount used in the movie.
She added in reality, “that is only enough to light a single light bulb for a few minutes,” not destroy a city.
It’s evident then, that the production and use of antimatter is not going to reach dangerous levels anytime soon, said Heelan. However, CERN is using the LHC to produce it.
And although it may be difficult to generate and harness, there are many uses for antimatter that make it valuable, said Heelan. It is not used as an alternative energy source like the movie says; instead, it is used to create the radioactive material used in positron emission tomography (PET) scans which can lead to the diagnosis of cancer and Alzheimer’s disease.
Research at CERN is also being done to understand more about the Higgs Boson particle, also known as the God particle. Still, there is no extensive knowledge on this, but Heelan said scientists are interested because this particle is what gives things their mass, and therefore has helped form our Universe.
In order to find out more about antimatter and the God Particle, a seven story tall detector called ATLAS was installed in the LHC.
ATLAS has a Carleton connection because 18 people from the university worked on developing and building it. A 4,000 kilogram part of ATLAS was made here.
“In total, ATLAS is 45 metres long, 25 metres high, and 7,000 tons. So it weighs as much as the Eiffel Tower!” explained Heelan.
Further, “everything was designed to one tenth the diameter of human hair,” she said.
Heelan said she hopes her lecture will enlighten people as well as “give them more correct awareness and make sure that people are not scared” of the science because of the way it was portrayed in the film.