A source of antihydrogen for in-flight hyperfine spectroscopy.
basic_science · Level V
Where this comes from
- Record sourced from PubMed, PMID 24448273.
- Also identified by DOI 10.1038/ncomms4089 and PMC identifier 3945878.
- Licence recorded as CC BY-NC-ND.
- Because redistribution is not established, this page shows the abstract only. Follow the links below for the full text.
Abstract
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.