Antimatter was first predicted in 1931, by Dirac. Work with high-energy antiparticles is now commonplace, and anti-electrons are used regularly in the medical technique of positron emission tomography scanning. Antihydrogen, the bound state of an antiproton and a positron, has been produced at low energies at CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research) since 2002. Antihydrogen is of interest for use in a precision test of nature's fundamental symmetries. The charge conjugation/parity/time reversal (CPT) theorem, a crucial part of the foundation of the standard model of elementary particles and interactions, demands that hydrogen and antihydrogen have the same spectrum. Given the current experimental precision of measurements on the hydrogen atom (about two parts in 10(14) for the frequency of the 1s-to-2s transition), subjecting antihydrogen to rigorous spectroscopic examination would constitute a compelling, model-independent test of CPT. Antihydrogen could also be used to study the gravitational behaviour of antimatter. However, so far experiments have produced antihydrogen that is not confined, precluding detailed study of its structure. Here we demonstrate trapping of antihydrogen atoms. From the interaction of about 10(7) antiprotons and 7 × 10(8) positrons, we observed 38 annihilation events consistent with the controlled release of trapped antihydrogen from our magnetic trap; the measured background is 1.4 ± 1.4 events. This result opens the door to precision measurements on anti-atoms, which can soon be subjected to the same techniques as developed for hydrogen.
Invariance under the charge, parity, time-reversal (CPT) transformation 1 is one of the fundamental symmetries of the standard model of particle physics. This CPT invariance implies that the fundamental properties of antiparticles and their matter-conjugates are identical, apart from signs. There is a deep link between CPT invariance and Lorentz symmetry-that is, the laws of nature seem to be invariant under the symmetry transformation of spacetimealthough it is model dependent 2 . A number of high-precision CPT and Lorentz invariance tests-using a co-magnetometer, a torsion pendulum and a maser, among others-have been performed 3 , but only a few direct high-precision CPT tests that compare the fundamental properties of matter and antimatter are available [4][5][6][7][8] . Here we report high-precision cyclotron frequency comparisons of a single antiproton and a negatively charged hydrogen ion (H 2 ) carried out in a Penning trap system. From 13,000 frequency measurements we compare the charge-to-mass ratio for the antiproton (q=m) p to that for the proton q=m ð Þ p and obtain q=m ð{12 . The measurements were performed at cyclotron frequencies of 29.6 megahertz, so our result shows that the CPT theorem holds at the atto-electronvolt scale. Our precision of 69 parts per trillion exceeds the energy resolution of previous antiproton-toproton mass comparisons 7,9 as well as the respective figure of merit of the standard model extension 10 by a factor of four. In addition, we give a limit on sidereal variations in the measured ratio of ,720 parts per trillion. By following the arguments of ref. 11, our result can be interpreted as a stringent test of the weak equivalence principle of general relativity using baryonic antimatter, and it sets a new limit on the gravitational anomaly parameter of a g {1 , 8.7 3 10 27 . The standard model is the theory that describes particles and their fundamental interactions, although without taking into account gravitation. However, this model is known to be incomplete, which has inspired searches for physics beyond the standard model, such as tests of CPT invariance that compare the fundamental properties of matterto-antimatter equivalents at the lowest energies and with the greatest precision [12][13][14][15] . For leptons, for example, the magnetic anomalies of electron and positron were compared with a fractional uncertainty of about 2 parts per billion 4 , and by applying similar techniques to protons and antiprotons, the resulting g-factor (a proportionality constant which links the spin of a particle to its magnetic moment) comparison reached a precision of 4.4 parts per million 8 . We are planning to improve this measurement by at least a factor of a thousand 16,17 . In this context, we recently reported the most precise and first direct high-precision measurement of the proton magnetic moment, with a fractional precision of 3.3 parts per billion 18 . Complementary to these efforts, spectroscopic comparisons of hydrogen and antihydrogen are underway; recent progress has been...
Precise comparisons of the fundamental properties of matterantimatter conjugates provide sensitive tests of charge-parity-time (CPT) invariance 1 , which is an important symmetry that rests on basic assumptions of the standard model of particle physics. Experiments on mesons 2 , leptons 3,4 and baryons 5,6 have compared different properties of matter-antimatter conjugates with fractional uncertainties at the parts-per-billion level or better. One specific quantity, however, has so far only been known to a fractional uncertainty at the parts-per-million level 7,8 : the magnetic moment of the antiproton, μ p . The extraordinary difficulty in measuring μ p with high precision is caused by its intrinsic smallness; for example, it is 660 times smaller than the magnetic moment of the positron 3 . Here we report a high-precision measurement of μ p in units of the nuclear magneton μ N with a fractional precision of 1.5 parts per billion (68% confidence level). We use a two-particle spectroscopy method in an advanced cryogenic multi-Penning trap system. Our result μ p = −2.7928473441(42)μ N (where the number in parentheses represents the 68% confidence interval on the last digits of the value) improves the precision of the previous best μ p measurement 8 by a factor of approximately 350. The measured value is consistent with the proton magnetic moment 9 , μ p = 2.792847350(9)μ N , and is in agreement with CPT invariance. Consequently, this measurement constrains the magnitude of certain CPT-violating effects 10 to below 1.8 × 10 −24 gigaelectronvolts, and a possible splitting of the protonantiproton magnetic moments by CPT-odd dimension-five interactions to below 6 × 10 −12 Bohr magnetons 11 .Within the physics programme at the Antiproton Decelerator of CERN, the properties of protons and antiprotons 5,6 , antiprotons and electrons 12 , and hydrogen 13 and antihydrogen 14,15 are compared with high precision. Such experiments, including those described here, provide stringent tests of CPT invariance. Our presented antiproton magnetic moment measurement reaches a fractional precision of 1.5 parts per billion (p.p.b.) at 68% confidence level, enabled by our new measurement scheme. Compared to the double-Penning trap technique 16 used in the measurement of the proton magnetic moment 9 , this new method eliminates the need for cyclotron cooling in each measurement cycle and increases the sampling rate.Our technique uses a hot cyclotron antiproton for measurements of the cyclotron frequency ν c , and a cold Larmor antiproton to determine the Larmor frequency ν L . By evaluating the ratio of the frequencies measured in the same magnetic field, the magnetic moment of the antiproton (in units of the nuclear magneton, the g-factor) ν ν μ μN is obtained. With this new technique we have improved the precision of the previous best antiproton magnetic moment measurement 8 by a factor of approximately 350 (Fig. 1a).Our experiment 17 is located in the Antiproton Decelerator facility, which provides bunches of 30 million antiprotons at a...
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