The Nobel Physics Laureate Opens the Fifth Edition of the BBVA Foundation Lecture Series

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The Nobel physics laureate opens the fifth edition of the BBVA Foundation lecture series on cosmology and astrophysics

Samuel Ting: “I try to understand what theoretical physicists are thinking, but never pay attention to what they say”

 Ting spoke yesterday on the subject of the AMS experiment, which uses the largest scientific instrument on board the International Space Station to search for primordial anti-matter and dark matter.

 In almost five years in space, the AMS has detected 80 billion cosmic rays, ushering in a new way to observe the cosmos.

 This talk kicks off the fifth edition of Science of the Cosmos. Science in the Cosmos: a series of lectures in the BBVA Foundation that has welcomed world authorities in the most active areas of astrophysics, from the study of the origins of the Universe to the search for life on other planets by way of ultra-exotic, high- energy phenomena such as black holes or gamma ray bursts. Videos of the lectures can be viewed in full on www.fbbva.es

Madrid, April 12, 2016.- The biggest scientific experiment on the International Space Station is an externally mounted seven-ton module that has been running now for almost five years. Its mission: to detect the mysterious phenomena known as cosmic rays. These high-energy particles, which can only be studied indirectly from the Earth’s surface, may hold the answer to two key open questions in modern physics: where is the Universe’s lost anti-matter and what does dark matter consist of? But first we have to understand the origin and properties of cosmic rays, and this is still a distant prospect, observes the head of the experiment, Nobel laureate Samuel Ting.

“Our experiment launched in 2011, and in these five years we have captured 80 billion cosmic rays,” says Ting. “This is the first time that we have had so much data on cosmic rays, at such high energy levels. We have only analyzed a small portion – the whole lot will take years – and our results to date show that our previous understanding of charged cosmic rays was not correct. They are totally different from the theoretical predictions, and totally different from previous measurements. This means that we really do not understood what goes on in space, and need a completely new theory to explain it.”

Cosmic rays are particles – electrons, positrons, protons, anti-protons and nuclei of atoms like helium, lithium, carbon, oxygen, etc. – that reach Earth without us knowing much

1 about the process that produced them.

Ting was in the BBVA Foundation yesterday to open the Science of the Cosmos. Science in the Cosmos lecture series, explaining the nature of his experiment, the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS).

Samuel Ting leads the multitudinous AMS team, a collaboration between 56 institutes in 16 countries, Spain among them, with the involvement of 600 physicists. When he designed the experiment in the early 1990s, his goal was to solve a problem that had intrigued him since receiving the Nobel Prize in 1976: “If there is matter, there must be anti-matter. But the question is, ‘where is the Universe consisting of anti-matter?’ The disappearance of anti-matter is one of the great mysteries of the cosmos.”

Introducing Ting was physicist Manuel Aguilar Benítez de Lugo of the Royal Spanish Academy of Exact, Physical and Natural Sciences, a member of the Spanish group from CIEMAT (Centro de Investigaciones Energéticas, Medioambientales y Tecnológicas) participating in AMS.

According to the Big Bang, to date the most widely accepted model for how it all began, the Universe should harbor an equal quantity of matter and what physicists call “anti- matter”, an evocative term referring to something so real it is regularly used in hospitals (PET medical imaging scanners operate with positrons or “anti-electrons”). However astronomers have yet to find the “anti-Universe” the theory predicts.

Many physicists now believe that primordial anti-matter simply doesn’t exist: “For most people, in modern theory, there is no such thing as the anti-matter Universe,” Ting explains. “In the last few decades, a lot of CERN experiments have been looking for evidence [that there is no primordial anti-matter], but no one has seen anything. What we want to do is look very carefully to see whether anti-matter exists or not.”

For Ting, the priority is to ensure that the data are of the best possible quality. “Explaining them is the work of theoretical physicists,” he notes. “A good experimentalist must know theory, but he or she must also know the limits of theory. When you do an experiment, it is extremely important to stay away from the influence of the theorists. At least it is for me. I know good, very good theoretical physicists. And when I talk to them I try to understand what they are thinking, but never pay attention to what they say,” he adds laughing.

A complicated history

The story of the AMS experiment is fraught with incidents and controversies that were largely overcome thanks to Ting’s perseverance. Conceived in the 1990s with its launch date scheduled for 2005, the AMS was eventually launched in 2011 despite criticism from within the physicist community – NASA scientists feared that the cost of the project, around two billion dollars, would leave too large a hole in the agency’s science budget – and a series of unforeseen obstacles arising, for instance, from the Columbia space shuttle accident of 2003.

2 Ting made it his personal business to bring international partners on board – even rounding-up the funding – and to convince the United States Government that it was worth scheduling an additional U.S. space shuttle flight – the last – just to take the experiment to the International Space Station. The original plan was to have the AMS installed there for a period of three years. However with no space shuttles to bring it back, the instrument eventually became a permanent module which should in theory go on observing for the rest of the Station’s working life, that is, until the year 2025.

80 billion cosmic rays

As Manuel Aguilar explains, “the AMS experiment sets out to measure the energy and directionality of the elementary particles and atomic nuclei that make up cosmic radiation with an unprecedented accuracy. These measurements could help to elucidate the nature of dark matter, confirm the existence of cosmic anti-matter created in the Universe’s earliest moments, reveal hitherto unknown phenomena and advance our understanding of the origin of cosmic rays.”

After almost five years in operation on the International Space Station, the AMS has collected precise data on some 80 billion cosmic rays. This stands as a considerable feat equivalent to throwing wide open a previously half-open window onto the cosmos. Only faint traces of cosmic rays ever reach Earth’s surface, due to atmospheric perturbations. In space, however, they can be captured directly, yielding key data like the particle’s mass and electric charge.

It is analysis of this kind of data that should ultimately unwrap the secrets of dark matter or anti-matter. Aguilar explains that existing measurements may hint at the detection of dark matter, but could also be explained by processes derived from other astrophysical phenomena like pulsars, supernova remnants or anomalous cosmic rays. “To reach a firm conclusion, we need to collect more data,” he points out. And the same is true with primordial anti-matter.

A Nobel laureate who never went to school

Samuel Ting (Michigan, United States, 1936) has held a professorship at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) since 1969. He was awarded the 1976 Nobel Prize in Physics, jointly with Burton Richter, for discovering a new subatomic particle – the J particle – whose existence had not been predicted, through a monumental task of painstaking investigation. The Nobel committee described his achievement as like “hearing a cricket near a jumbo jet,” and bestowed the award just a few years after the particle’s discovery, when Ting was barely 40 years old. Among the most surprising chapters in his life story are a childhood with no schooling, due to the war in China, and his arrival at an American university with no knowledge of English to begin a degree course that would lead him in record time to a PhD. Ting relates that he was born in the United States while his parents, both Chinese, were pursuing their doctorate studies – him in engineering, her in psychology. When Japan invaded China, the couple decided to return to their country with their firstborn child, then just a few months old. Ting never went to school, but, as he himself explains, had access to science and culture through his parents and their contacts with colleagues in the academic world.

3 In 1956, at the age of 20, he decided to travel to the United States to study engineering, physics and mathematics at the University of Michigan, where he arrived with little money and less English. With the help of a university scholarship, three years later he had a BS in mathematics and physics, and by 1962 had completed a physics PhD. A few months later he began work in the organization that was the forerunner of CERN. The following story says much about Ting’s strength of character, renowned among his peers. When he won the Nobel, he delivered his acceptance speech in Mandarin – the first case in the history of the prize – to the consternation of the U.S. ambassador to Sweden. Ting said that one of his aims in doing so was to attract young people in China to experimental science. In an interview he granted in 2011 as part of an MIT-produced science history program, he was clear that the Nobel “didn’t change me. I simply went on doing my experiments (…) Like other laureates, I was asked to state my opinions publicly. I never did. I see the Nobel Prize as a recognition for a particular contribution that I gave to science, but that doesn’t make me an expert in psychology or politics.”

He is however an acknowledged expert in his ability to lead large groups. Before forming the international team for the AMS, he led the group of fifty physicists working on L3, one of the detectors of CERN’s LEP accelerator, the precursor of today’s LHC.

Spain’s participation in the AMS

Spain’s contribution to the AMS Project is spearheaded by researchers from the Particle Astrophysics Division of the Basic Research Department at public research institution CIEMAT. This team has worked with Samuel Ting on diverse projects since 1981 (on the AMS since 1997), joined in the year 2000 by a small group from the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC).

The CIEMAT team led the construction of an instrument mounted in the AMS detector to take precise measurements of the speed and electric charge of cosmic nuclei. It was also involved in the construction of the first spaceborne superconducting magnet (though due to the Columbia accident it was finally prevented from traveling with the AMS), and is one of the most active groups in analyzing the information collected.

Among the governance responsibilities it has taken on within the AMS Collaboration, we can cite international relations with CERN and with the agencies of member countries, plus the monitoring and financial control of the detector assembly process at CERN. A number of Spanish companies have also been prominently involved in the project, particularly CRISA-EADS and IberEspacio.

About the lecture series Science of the Cosmos. Science in the Cosmos

The fifth edition of Science of the Cosmos. Science in the Cosmos “features some of the Universe’s most energetic events as well as some unforgettable images,” in the words of series director Ana Achúcarro, Professor of Theoretical Physics at Leiden University (Netherlands) and the University of the Basque Country, UPV-EHU (Spain).

Achúcarro singles out an event that recently shook the world of astrophysics and science in general: “The announcement early this year of the direct detection of gravitational waves one hundred years after Einstein predicted their existence.” One of the six

4 speakers in the current series is David Reitze, the leader of the experiment responsible for what Achúcarro calls “an astonishing technological achievement” in view of the extreme accuracy of measurement demanded.

The remaining speakers, aside from Ting, are Saku Tsuneta (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, JAXA), who will show spectacular film of the solar magnetic field and solar flares; Mark McCaughrean (European Space Agency, ESA), who will talk about the exploration of the solar system; Reinhard Genzel (Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics, Germany), who has spent two decades observing the black hole at the heart of our galaxy; and Werner Hofmann (Max Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics, Germany), who will talk about the future Cherenkov Telescope Array (CTA), part of it sited in the Canary Islands.

For more information, contact the BBVA Foundation Department of Communication and Institutional Relations (+34 91 374 5210 / [email protected]) or visit www.fbbva.es