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Saturday, April 30, 2011

Cosmic Log - It's showtime for antimatter hunters

Cosmic Log - It's showtime for antimatter hunters: "Big particle-physics experiments have caused their share of unwarranted nightmares over the past few years, including the worries about globe-gobbling black holes and strangelets that might be created by Europe's Large Hadron Collider. The Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer, a $2 billion particle detector due to go into orbit on the shuttle Endeavour, just might actually detect strangelets, or the traces of mysterious dark matter, or bits of antimatter that couldn't possibly be created on Earth.

But Samuel Ting, the Nobel-winning MIT physicist who has guided the spectrometer through a troubled 17-year-long development effort, will actually be sleeping a lot easier once the AMS is launched.

'Our only nightmare for AMS during the 17 years was to be removed from the manifest,' Ting, the experiment's principal investigator, told me today."

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