Pulsed production of antihydrogen

Abstract

Antihydrogen atoms with K or sub-K temperature are a powerful tool to precisely probe the validity of fundamental physics laws and the design of highly sensitive experiments needs antihydrogen with controllable and well defined conditions. We present here experimental results on the production of antihydrogen in a pulsed mode in which the time when 90% of the atoms are produced is known with an uncertainty of ~250 ns. The pulsed source is generated by the charge-exchange reaction between Rydberg positronium atoms—produced via the injection of a pulsed positron beam into a nanochanneled Si target, and excited by laser pulses—and antiprotons, trapped, cooled and manipulated in electromagnetic traps. The pulsed production enables the control of the antihydrogen temperature, the tunability of the Rydberg states, their de-excitation by pulsed lasers and the manipulation through electric field gradients. The production of pulsed antihydrogen is a major landmark in the AE$$\bar{g}$$ ḡ IS experiment to perform direct measurements of the validity of the Weak Equivalence Principle for antimatter.

Gravitational matter-antimatter impact interactions

“…The planned experiments with antihydrogen will, therefore, be of great importance to show, whether or not WEP is valid for antimatter (Amsler et al 2021;Chardin et al 2021).…”

A new Monte Carlo muon generator for cosmic-ray muon applications

“…Another field of application concerns the use of the cosmic ray muons to align structures (in particular, Particle Physics tracking detectors [13]) or even to calibrate the response of Particle Physics detectors (some of the co-authors of the present paper successfully performed the calibration of detectors built with photomultipliers and bent scintillator slabs, in the framework of the AEgiS collaboration at the CERN AD [14,15]), For a recent and comprehensive review of all these applications, see [16].…”

Sympathetic cooling schemes for separately trapped ions coupled via image currents

“…In particular, their charge-to-mass ratio is compared at a relative precision of 69 × 10 −12 [16] and their magnetic moments are measured with fractional resolutions of 3 × 10 −10 [17] and 1.5 × 10 −9 [18], respectively; all being the most precise measurements of these quantities to date. However, especially the magnetic moment measurements are limited by the nonzero particle temperature of 1 K. Other experimental programs that are subject to comparable limitations include the spectroscopy of highly-charged ions [8,19], the cooling of antiprotons and positrons for the synthesis of cold antihydrogen [5,20,21], mass measurements of heavy elements [6,22], or high-precision metrology with atomic clocks [7,23].…”