Testing antimatter gravity with muonium Kirch, Klaus; Khaw, Kim Siang
International Journal of Modern Physics: Conference Series,
2014, Letnik:
30
Journal Article, Conference Proceeding
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The debate about how antimatter or different antimatter systems behave gravitationally will be ultimately decided by experiments measuring directly the acceleration of various antimatter probes in ...the gravitational field of the Earth or perhaps redshift effects in antimatter atoms caused by the annual variation of the Sun's gravitational potential at the location of the Earth. Muonium atoms may be used to probe the gravitational interaction of leptonic, second generation antimatter. We discuss the progress of our work towards enabling such experiments with muonium.
Experiments with muons (
μ
+
) and muonium atoms (
μ
+
e
−
) offer several promising possibilities for testing fundamental symmetries. Examples of such experiments include the search for a muon ...electric dipole moment, measurement of the muon
g
− 2 and experiments with muonium from laser spectroscopy to gravity experiments. These experiments require high quality muon beams with small transverse size and high intensity at low energy. At the Paul Scherrer Institute, Switzerland, we are developing a novel device that reduces the phase space of a standard
μ
+
beam by a factor of 10
10
with 10
− 3
efficiency. The phase space compression is achieved by stopping a standard
μ
+
beam in cryogenic helium gas. The stopped
μ
+
are manipulated into a small spot using complex electric and magnetic fields in combination with gas density gradients. From there, the muons are extracted into the vacuum and into a field-free region. Various aspects of this compression scheme have been demonstrated. In this article the current status will be reported.
We plan to measure several 2S-2P transition frequencies in mu He-4(+) and mu He-3(+) by means of laser spectroscopy with an accuracy of 50 ppm. This will lead to a determination of the corresponding ...nuclear rms charge radii with a relative accuracy of 3 x 10(-4), limited by the uncertainty of the nuclear polarization contribution. First, these measurements will help to solve the proton radius puzzle. Second, these very precise nuclear radii are benchmarks for ab initio few-nucleon theories and potentials. Finally when combined with an ongoing measurement of the 1S-2S transition in He+, these measurements will lead to an enhanced bound-state QED test of the 1S Lamb shift in He+.
Ultracold neutrons (UCN) are free neutrons that can be stored in experimental setups for several minutes. Some of the most important properties of the neutron, such as its tiny permanent electric ...dipole moment and its beta decay lifetime, are best measured with UCN. Also searches for well motivated but yet unknown, hypothetical additional interactions are being pursued with UCN. Such measurements in the field of low-energy, precision physics may have far reaching implications from particle physics to cosmology. Most experiments are statistics limited and need high-intensity UCN sources. The UCN source at PSI is at the forefront of the field and home to the international nEDM collaboration and its world-leading search for the neutron electric dipole moment. This article aims at giving an overview of the fascinating research using ultracold neutrons emphasizing on activities at PSI including various physics side-analyses which were pioneered by the nEDM collaboration.
The Paul Scherrer Institut in Switzerland operates the high intensity proton accelerator facility HIPA. A 590 MeV kinetic energy proton beam of presently up to 2.4 mA is sent to target stations ...producing pions, muons and neutrons for fundamental and applied physics. The beam power of 1.4 MW provides the world's highest intensities of low momentum muons which can be stopped in low mass targets. Rates of surface muons of up to about \(10^8\)/s are being provided to various unique precision particle physics experiments. Two feasibility studies are ongoing to considerably improve the available muon beams. The high intensity muon beamline, HiMB, could deliver on the order of \(10^{10}\)/s surface muons and the stopped muon cooler, muCool, aims at a gain factor of \(10^{10}\) in phase space quality while sacrificing only less than 3 orders of magnitude in intensity for low energy \(\mu^+\). These beams will allow a new generation of precision physics experiments with stopped muons and muonium atoms.
Searches for permanent electric dipole moments of fundamental particles and systems with spin are the experiments most sensitive to new CP violating physics and a top priority of a growing ...international community. We briefly review the current status of the field emphasizing on the charged leptons and lightest baryons.
In applications of optical multipass cells in photochemical reactors and laser excitation of weak transitions, estimation of the radiation dose in a volume of interest allows to assess the ...performance and optimize the design of the cell. We adopt radiant fluence as the figure of merit and employ the radiative transfer equation to derive analytical expressions for average radiant fluence in a given volume of interest. These are used to establish practical approximations and a Monte Carlo ray tracing model of the spatial distribution of fluence. Ray tracing is performed with Zemax OpticsStudio 18.9.
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