Insight Autumn 2011 Page 7

A University of Liverpool
lecturer has won the
Guardian first book prize,
a prestigious award for
first time authors.

Alexandra Harris's book, Romantic Moderns: English Writers, Artists

and the Imagination from Virginia Woolf to John Piper, provides a re-
evaluation of the arts in Britain during the 1930s and 1940s. It beat four
other authors to the £10,000 prize and an advertising package with the
Guardian and Observer. Previous winners of the award include Zadie
Smith and Jonathan Safran Foer.

Guardian Literary Editor, Claire Armistead, who chaired the judging

panel, said: "Alexandra's groundbreaking book is a reminder of how
important higher education is to literature."

Alexandra has also become one of the winners of the Arts and

Humanities Research Council and BBC Radio 3's New Generation
Thinkers Scheme.

The largest centre in England for social science
postgraduate training has been established
between the Universities of Liverpool, Manchester
and Lancaster.

The North West Doctoral Training Centre (NWDTC) is

one of 21 in the UK, created by the Economic and Social
Research Council (ESRC), and will provide PhD students
with access to quality research training in social science
disciplines. The centre is guaranteed a total of 63 new
postgraduate studentships per year across the full range of
social science disciplines to support research and training
at doctoral level. This will amount to more than £15 million of
investment over the next five years.

Scientists trap antimatter at

ALPHA experiment

North West becomes

largest centre for
PhD training

Lecturer wins
Guardian

first book prize

Liverpool physicists have succeeded
in trapping atoms of antimatter for
more than 16 minutes, long enough to
begin to study their properties in detail.

Working with a team from Swansea

University, antimatter was trapped using an
experiment called ALPHA, part of a broad
programme at CERN, the European
Organization for Nuclear Research. ALPHA
uses a silicon vertex detector which was
designed, commissioned, and built in the

Liverpool Semiconductor Detector Centre.

Professor Paul Nolan from the Department of Physics who leads the

Liverpool team, said: "Our aim is to study antihydrogen, and make detailed
comparisons with ordinary hydrogen. Whilst hydrogen is the most abundant
element in the Universe, it seems that antihydrogen has only ever been formed
in our experiments here on Earth. Why there was no antimatter left when the
Universe became cold enough for atoms to form remains a great mystery, and
one we hope to shed some light upon."

The next step for ALPHA is to start performing measurements on trapped

antihydrogen, and this is due to get underway later this year. The first step is to
illuminate the trapped anti-atoms with microwaves and determine if they absorb
exactly the same frequencies, or energies, as matter.