Speaker
Description
Steven A. Jones (1) from the ALPHA collaboration (2)
1) Department of Physics and Astronomy, Aarhus University, DK-8000 Aarhus C, Denmark.
steven.armstrong.jones@cern.ch
2) CERN, CH-1211 Geneve 23, Switzerland
Antihydrogen offers a unique way to test matter/antimatter symmetry. Antihydrogen can reproducibly be synthesised and trapped in the laboratory for extended periods of time [1][2], offering an opportunity to study the properties of antimatter with high precision. The ALPHA collaboration at CERN has developed an experiment capable of accumulating several tens of trapped antihydrogen atoms [3], and interrogating the bound state energy structure using resonant microwaves [4] and laser light [5]. These recent results demonstrate that spectroscopic measurements of trapped antihydrogen are possible, and the collaboration is firmly en-route towards high precision measurements. Here, I present an overview of the ALPHA apparatus and the techniques which have been developed for measuring the spectrum of antihydrogen.
[1] G. B. Andresen et al. (ALPHA-Collaboration), Nature 468, 673 (2010).
[2] G. B. Andresen et al. (ALPHA-Collaboration), Nature Physics 7, 558 (2011).
[3] M. Ahmadi et al. (ALPHA-Collaboration), Nature Communications 8, 681 (2017).
[4] M. Ahmadi et al. (ALPHA-Collaboration), Nature 548, 66 (2017).
[5] M. Ahmadi et al. (ALPHA-Collaboration), Nature 541, 506 (2017).