Speaker
Description
Although antimatter is known since almost a century, the matter-antimatter asymmetry in the Universe is one of the biggest mystery of our time. At the Antimatter Factory at CERN, among other experiments, the ALPHA collaboration is studying the properties of antihydrogen to shed light on such asymmetry. In particular, although the gravitational interaction between matter and antimatter has been the subject of theoretical speculation since the discovery of the latter in 1928, only recently the ALPHA experiment at CERN was able to observe, for the first time, the effects of gravity on antimatter atoms. After a description of the experimental apparatus, details about how antihydrogen is produced will be given. Finally, the measurement of the acceleration of gravity of antihydrogen atoms falling in the Earth gravitational field [1] will be presented.
[1] E. Anderson et al., "Observation of the effect of gravity on the motion of antimatter", Nature 2023, 621, 716–722
| Abstract Category | Nuclear Physics |
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