Professor to Lecture about Angels and Demons June 3

MELBOURNE, FLA. — Mark Baarmand, Florida Institute of Technology professor of physics and space sciences, will present the science behind the upcoming movie
“Angels and Demons” June 3. The free and open lecture will be at 8 p.m. in the F.W. Olin Engineering Complex Auditorium on campus, Room EC118.

Part of the movie was filmed at the European Center for Particle Physics (CERN) in Geneva, Switzerland. Written by Dan Brown, “Angels and Demons” is
similar to his other adaptation “The Da Vinci Code.” It is a suspense story about the Illuminati, a secret society that wants to annihilate the
Vatican using an antimatter bomb stolen from a CERN scientist.

In subatomic physics, matter and antimatter have the same mass, but opposite electric charge. For each basic particle of matter, there exists an
antiparticle. For example, the negatively charged electron has a positively charged antiparticle called the positron. When a particle and its antiparticle
come together, at the blink of an eye they both disappear in a flash as the annihilation process transforms their mass into energy.”

Baarmand recently received a $465,000 grant from the Department of Energy (DOE), which is part of the more than $1.1 million that the DOE has previously
funded him for his work on the Compact Muon Solenoid project at CERN.