Dr. Seyda Ipek Carleton University Email: sipek@physics.carleton.ca Speaker webpage: seydaipek.com

Why Are We Here? -- Matter-Antimatter Asymmetry Of The Universe

Everything around us, cookies, rocks, stars, galaxies, etc. is made up of “matter” and not “antimatter”. The Standard Model of elementary particles, our current theory of the building blocks of the universe, predicts that an equal number of particles and antiparticles were created at the beginning of our universe. (An antiparticle is a twin of a particle, having the same mass but opposite charges.) From theory and experiments we know that if antimatter comes close to matter, they annihilate each other leaving only energy behind. That we are here means there is no antimatter to annihilate with us. If there were equal amounts at the beginning, what happened to the antimatter in the universe? How did it disappear? Why did matter stay behind? I will talk about this mystery and possible ways to solve it, which requires new elementary particles and phenomena beyond the ones predicted by the Standard Model of particle physics.

Seyda Ipek is an Assistant Professor at Carleton University, Department of Physics. She is a theoretical particle physicist, studying beyond-the-Standard Model physics. Dr. Ipek received her BSc degree in physics at Bilkent University and her MSc degree from Koc University. Dr. Ipek then attended the University of Washington for her PhD, studying theoretical particle physics. Her thesis work focused on beyond the Standard Model theories exploring the origins of dark matter and matter-antimatter asymmetry. Dr. Ipek was a visiting Junior Research Fellow at Oxford University before joining the Fermi National Laboratory in Illinois, USA as a research assistant. She then joined the theoretical particle group at the University of California, Irvine Physics Department as a Presidential Postdoctoral Fellow. She now works as an assistant professor at Carleton University Department of Physics. Besides her academic work in particle physics, Dr. Ipek is also a co-founder of a Turkish women in science group, Bilim Kadinlari, with more than thirty thousand followers on Twitter. This group shares the work of Turkish woman scientists all around the world with their followers.