Published June 1997 | Version v1
Journal article

Antihydrogen production and precision experiments

Description

The study of CPT invariance with the highest achievable precision in all particle sectors is of fundamental importance for physics. Equally important is the question of the gravitational acceleration of antimatter. In recent years, impressive progress has been achieved in capturing antiprotons in specially designed Penning traps, in cooling them to energies of a few milli-electron volts, and in storing them for hours in a small volume of space. Positrons have been accumulated in large numbers in similar traps, and low energy positron or positronium beams have been generated. Finally, steady progress has been made in trapping and cooling neutral atoms. Thus the ingredients to form antihydrogen at rest are at hand. Once antihydrogen atoms have been captured at low energy, spectroscopic methods can be applied to interrogate their atomic structure with extremely high precision and compare it to its normal matter counterpart, the hydrogen atom. Especially the 1S-2S transition, with a lifetime of the excited state of 122 msec and thereby a natural linewidth of 5 parts in 1016, offers in principle the possibility to directly compare matter and antimatter properties at a level of 1 part in 1018. (orig.)

Additional details

Publishing Information

Journal Title
Nuclear Physics. B, Proceedings Supplements
Journal Volume
56
Journal Issue
A
Journal Page Range
p. 336-348.
ISSN
0920-5632
CODEN
NPBSE7

Conference

Title
4. biennial conference on low energy antiproton physics (LEAP-4).
Dates
27-31 Aug 1996.
Place
Dinkelsbuehl (Germany).