Perspectives for precision tests with antihydrogen

by Prof. Michael Doser (CERN)

Friday 9 Dec 2011, 14:30 → 15:30 Europe/Brussels

Large seminar room (IIHE(ULB-VUB))

Experimental studies of Antihydrogen at the Antiproton Decelerator at CERN have a short history, but an ambitious future: a first generation of experiments which produced large numbers of antihydrogen atoms for the first time in 2002 has given place to a second wave of experiments which have just now (2010) managed to trap and are attempting the next steps of measuring and cooling antihydrogen atoms. The goal of these experiments is to carry out comparative precision spectroscopy between Hydrogen and Antihydrogen, in view of testing the CPT theorem, either through 1S-2S spectroscopy, or via a measurement of the hyperfine splitting of the ground state of antihydrogen. A related class of experiments, among them the AEGIS experiment, combines techniques from these experiments with techniques from spectroscopic studies of Positronium produced in nanoporous materials and advances in other fields to form beams of antihydrogen atoms. An overview of the challenges, limitations and perspectives of these, and results from related experiments will be presented, and an outlook for the next several years will be given. A particular emphasis will be placed on the AEGIS experiment, which in a first step aims to reach a 1% precision on the gravitational interaction of antihydrogen by measuring its free fall over its parabolic trajectory.

Slides ULB_Dec2011.pdf