Speaker
Dr
Makoto Fujiwara
(TRIUMF)
Description
ALPHA is an international project at CERN, with substantial Canadian involvement, whose ultimate goal is to test symmetry between matter and antimatter
via comparisons of the properties of atomic hydrogen with its antimatter counter-part,
antihydrogen. After several years of development, we have recently achieved significant milestones, including the first stable
confinement of antihydrogen [1] for as long as 1000 seconds [2]. ALPHA has also succeeded in performing the first
proof-of-principle spectroscopic measurement on antihydrogen atoms by driving their hyperfine transitions with
microwaves [3]. Furthermore, we reported a precision measurement of charge neutrality of antihydrogen [4], which in turn provides an improved
measurement of the electric charge of the positron.
Following these milestones, we have constructed an entirely new apparatus, ALPHA-2, which allows laser access to the trapped anti-atoms, and provides improved magnetic field configurations for microwave spectroscopy. For the longer-term, possibilities for measurements of the antimatter-gravity interaction are being explored.
This talk will discuss the motivations, recent achievements and the future prospects of fundamental physics studies with ALPHA.
References : [1] G. B. Andresen et al., Nature 468, 673 (2010). [2] G.B. Andresen et al., Nature Physics 7, 558 (2011). [3] C.
Amole et al., Nature 483, 439 (2012). [4] C. Amole et al. Nature Communications 5, 3955 (2014)
Primary author
Dr
Makoto Fujiwara
(TRIUMF)
