AEGIS - Measuring the free fall of antimatter

par Alban Kellerbauer

vendredi 28 mars 2014, 14:00 → 15:00 Europe/Paris

Auditorium M. Vivargent (LAPP)

After the first production of cold antihydrogen by the ATHENA and ATRAP collaborations, second-generation experiments are being performed for measuring the fundamental properties of this antiatom. AEGIS (Antimatter Experiment: Gravity, Interferometry, Spectroscopy) is an experiment whose aim it is to measure the gravitational interaction between matter and antimatter with a pulsed, cold, horizontal antihydrogen beam. In AEGIS, antihydrogen will be produced by charge exchange reactions of cold antiprotons with positronium atoms excited to a Rydberg state. An antihydrogen beam will be formed by a controlled acceleration with an electric field gradient (Stark acceleration). Subsequently, the free-fall acceleration will be measured with a moiré deflectometer in order to test the weak equivalence principle of General Relativity. In this talk, after an introduction to antimatter physics, the present status of the experiment will be reviewed.

Slides Seminar_LAPP_AK.pdf