We report here the first successful synthesis of cold antihydrogen atoms employing a cusp trap, which consists of a superconducting anti-Helmholtz coil and a stack of multiple ring electrodes. This ...success opens a new path to make a stringent test of the CPT symmetry via high precision microwave spectroscopy of ground-state hyperfine transitions of antihydrogen atoms.
Antihydrogen, a positron bound to an antiproton, is the simplest antiatom. Its counterpart-hydrogen--is one of the most precisely investigated and best understood systems in physics research. ...High-resolution comparisons of both systems provide sensitive tests of CPT symmetry, which is the most fundamental symmetry in the Standard Model of elementary particle physics. Any measured difference would point to CPT violation and thus to new physics. Here we report the development of an antihydrogen source using a cusp trap for in-flight spectroscopy. A total of 80 antihydrogen atoms are unambiguously detected 2.7 m downstream of the production region, where perturbing residual magnetic fields are small. This is a major step towards precision spectroscopy of the ground-state hyperfine splitting of antihydrogen using Rabi-like beam spectroscopy.
Direct detection of antihydrogen atoms using a BGO crystal Nagata, Y.; Kuroda, N.; Ohtsuka, M. ...
Nuclear instruments & methods in physics research. Section A, Accelerators, spectrometers, detectors and associated equipment,
12/2016, Volume:
840
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
The ASACUSA collaboration has developed a detector consisting of a large size BGO crystal to detect an atomic antihydrogen beam, and performed the direct detection of antihydrogen atoms. Energy ...spectra from antihydrogen annihilation on the BGO crystal are discussed in comparison to simulation results from the GEANT4 toolkit. Background mainly originating from cosmic rays were strongly suppressed by analyzing the energy deposited in the BGO and requiring a multiplicity of charged pions. Thus antihydrogen events were identified.
Antiproton annihilation cross sections on medium-heavy and heavy nuclear targets are measured for the first time at 5.3 MeV kinetic energy at the Antiprotons Decelerator facility of CERN. The results ...agree with the expected behavior from the black-disk model with the Coulomb corrections.
The nuclear physics program of the ASACUSA experiment at the Antiproton Decelerator (AD) at CERN is concerned with the measurements of antiproton-nuclei cross-sections at low energies (from 5.3MeV ...down to the 100keV region). These measurements are expected to contribute to understand the dynamics of the annihilation process. We give here a full description of the experimental apparatus used for the measurements at 5.3MeV.
The AEgIS experiment located at the Antiproton Decelerator at CERN aims to measure the gravitational fall of a cold antihydrogen pulsed beam. The precise observation of the antiatoms in the Earth ...gravitational field requires a controlled production and manipulation of antihydrogen. The neutral antimatter is obtained via a charge exchange reaction between a cold plasma of antiprotons from ELENA decelerator and a pulse of Rydberg positronium atoms. The current custom electronics designed to operate the 5 and 1 T Penning traps are going to be replaced by a control system based on the ARTIQ & Sinara open hardware and software ecosystem. This solution is present in many atomic, molecular and optical physics experiments and devices such as quantum computers. We report the status of the implementation as well as the main features of the new control system.
The primary goal of the AEgIS collaboration at CERN is to measure the gravitational acceleration on neutral antimatter. Positronium (Ps), the bound state of an electron and a positron, is a suitable ...candidate for a force-sensitive inertial measurement by means of deflectometry/interferometry. In order to conduct such an experiment, the impact position and time of arrival of Ps atoms at the detector must be detected simultaneously. The detection of a low-velocity Ps beam with a spatial resolution of (88 ± 5) μm was previously demonstrated 1. Based on the methodology employed in 1 and 2, a hybrid imaging/timing detector with increased spatial resolution of about 10 μm was developed. The performance of a prototype was tested with a positron beam. The concept of the detector and first results are presented.
Applications of cosmic-ray (CR) muons have grown in numbers in the last decade. Measurements of flux attenuation (radiography) and scattering angles (tomography) of CR muons have been successfully ...applied to the inspection or monitoring of large natural and civil structures, to the search for heavy metals in container and trucks, to the control of nuclear wastes, and much more. In the present work, a new Monte Carlo generator of CR muons, called EcoMug and specifically designed for muon radiography and tomography applications, is presented. It is a header-only C++11 library, based on a parametrization of experimental data. Unlike other tools, EcoMug gives the possibility of generating from different surfaces (plane, cylinder and half-sphere), while keeping the correct angular and momentum distribution of generated tracks. For example, this flexibility allows for a very efficient generation of nearly horizontal muons, of great interest in many muon radiography and tomography applications, by using cylindrical or half-spherical generation surfaces. Finally, EcoMug also allows the generation of CR muons according to user-defined parametrizations of their differential flux. Main features of EcoMug, its mathematical foundation, as well as applications to selected study cases are presented.
Display omitted
•Design and development of an efficient parametric cosmic-ray muon generator.•Flexibility to generate from different surfaces: plane, cylinder and half-sphere.•Possibility to generate from a custom parametrization of the muon differential flux.
The existing data of antinucleon-nucleon and antinucleon-nuclei annihilation cross-sections are confined to energies above about 1MeV. Experimental limitations have prevented till now the lower ...energies data to be achieved in spite of the interest they represent for theoretical models. One of the unresolved question concerns the antiproton annihilation cross-section measured at LEAR on light nuclei in the MeV region, which show a saturation with the mass number of the target nucleus against any naive expectation. With regard to fundamental cosmology, the knowledge of the annihilation cross-sections at energies below 1MeV can contribute to understand the matter-antimatter asymmetry in the Universe. We present here the experimental demonstration of the feasibility of the measurement of antiproton-nuclei annihilation cross-sections in the 100 keV region.