Every year our groups makes large contributions to ALPHA over the summer. With many graduate students and undergraduates traveling to Geneva and making contributions do the experiment. This year we had: Celeste Carruth, Eric Hunter, Dalila Robledo, Dana Zimmer, Huws Landsberger, Michael Davis, and Andrew Christensen.
"If you can't contain it, you can't study it. That's the case with antimatter, an elusive substance that may hold secrets to matter, time and the universe. So far experiments, including work at CERN in Switzerland, had failed to confine antihydrogen. In this landmark 2010 paper, Gorm Andresen and his colleagues described the first experiments that trapped 38 antihydrogen atoms. Their work was enabled by plasma physics research and has opened the door to precise measurements of antihydrogen and other antimatter atoms."
Alpha's latest breakthrough, the first observation of the 1S-2S transition in trapped antihydrogen has been published in Nature and is the first time a spectral line has been observed in antihydrogen. This builds on years of work, developing techniques to manipulate super-cold antiprotons and positrons, create trapped antihydrogen and detect the very few atoms that are available to the experiment. It is another crucial step towards precision comparisons of antihydrogen and hydrogen.
Abstract: The ALPHA experiment performs both spectroscopic and gravitational measurements on antihydrogen. Apparatus can trap only about one atom at a time! All proposed measurements are difficult to perform on a single (anti-) atom. Proposal: Increase the number of antihydrogen atoms available to experiments by cooling positrons as they bind to antiprotons. Positrons in a magnetic field cool via spontaneous emission of cyclotron radiation.
Abstract: Generating cold (<50 K) single component electron plasmas is of critical importance to many experiments. Examples include optimizing recombination rates for antihydrogen or Rydberg atom production and producing mono-energetic beams. Replacing a section of a Penning-Malmberg trap with a high-Q cavity resonantly enhances spontaneous emission of cyclotron radiation in the cavity through interaction with electromagnetic modes. This allows for rapid cooling of a single-component electron plasma confined in the high-Q cavity.
