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Science

Coaxing Shy Particles Into an Atomic Jar

Alexander Hellemans

Published May 5, 2000• 3 citations
Publisher

Abstract

ANTIMATTERThanks to a new method a Dutch-American team has demonstrated for recombining free electrons with ions to form atoms, researcher may finally be able to create antimatter in sufficient quantities for study. In the 24 April Physical Review Letters , researchers describe how they enabled rubidium ions to trap electrons by applying a pulsed electric field in a series of steps similar to the way a child traps an insect in a jar. The team claims the technique can be used to produce atoms of antihydrogen, the simplest form of antimatter, in greater numbers than ever before.

DOI
10.1126/science.288.5467.788

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ANTIMATTERThanks to a new method a Dutch-American team has demonstrated for recombining free electrons with ions to form atoms, researcher may finally be able to create antimatter in sufficient quantities for study. In the 24 April Physical Review Letters , researchers describe how they enabled rubidium ions to trap electrons by applying a pulsed electric field in a series of steps similar to the way a child traps an insect in a jar. The team claims the technique can be used to produce atoms of antihydrogen, the simplest form of antimatter, in greater numbers than ever before.
Summary form only given. A breakthrough, paving the way to serious research into the properties of neutral antimatter, would be the wall-free confinement of cold antihydrogen atoms. To produce such cold antihydrogen atoms and catch them before they annihilate with matter is the primary goal of the ATRAP (antihydrogen trap) collaboration. Once trapped, cold antihydrogen atoms can be used for experiments such as tests of CPT invariance or gravity measurements. Here we present a new recombination scheme using pulsed electric fields as slow as 1 ns.
The pulsed-field recombination scheme is used to recombine free electrons with Li+{\mathrm{Li}}^{+}Li+ ions to produce neutral Li atoms in a high Rydberg state $(n\ensuremath{\approx}180).$ The experimental conditions are similar to the conditions under which antiprotons and positrons are recombined to produce cold antihydrogen. In the current experiments we have trapped electrons in a Penning trap $(B\ensuremath{\approx}35\mathrm{mT}).$ Subsequently these electrons were recombined with spatially separated Li+{\mathrm{Li}}^{+}Li+ ions. The recorded efficiency is 2.0% versus 0.3% in previous experiments with atomic ions. Several experiments and simulations were performed to study the dynamics of pulsed-field recombination in more detail.
Antihydrogen, the simplest pure-antimatter atomic system, holds the promise of direct tests of matter-antimatter equivalence and CPT invariance, two of the outstanding unanswered questions in modern physics. Antihydrogen is now routinely produced in charged-particle traps through the combination of plasmas of antiprotons and positrons, but the atoms escape and are destroyed in a minuscule fraction of a second. The focus of this work is the production of a sample of cold antihydrogen atoms in a magnetic atom trap. This poses an extreme challenge, because the state-of-the-art atom traps are only approximately 0.5 K deep for ground-state antihydrogen atoms, much shallower than the energies of particles stored in the plasmas. This thesis will outline the main parts of the ALPHA experiment, with an overview of the important physical processes at work. Antihydrogen production techniques will be described, and an analysis of the spatial annihilation distribution to give indications of the temperature and binding energy distribution of the atoms will be presented. Finally, we describe the techniques needed to demonstrate confinement of antihydrogen atoms, apply them to a data taking run and present the results, making a definitive identification of trapped antihydrogen atoms.
Antihydrogen, the simplest pure-antimatter atomic system, holds the promise of direct tests of matter-antimatter equivalence and CPT invariance, two of the outstanding unanswered questions in modern physics. Antihydrogen is now routinely produced in charged-particle traps through the combination of plasmas of antiprotons and positrons, but the atoms escape and are destroyed in a minuscule fraction of a second. The focus of this work is the production of a sample of cold antihydrogen atoms in a magnetic atom trap. This poses an extreme challenge, because the state-of-the-art atom traps are only approximately 0.5 K deep for ground-state antihydrogen atoms, much shallower than the energies of particles stored in the plasmas. This thesis will outline the main parts of the ALPHA experiment, with an overview of the important physical processes at work. Antihydrogen production techniques will be described, and an analysis of the spatial annihilation distribution to give indications of the temperature and binding energy distribution of the atoms will be presented. Finally, we describe the techniques needed to demonstrate confinement of antihydrogen atoms, apply them to a data taking run and present the results, making a definitive identification of trapped antihydrogen atoms.
The creation of cold antihydrogen atoms by the controlled combination of positrons and antiprotons has opened up a new window on fundamental physics. More recently, techniques have been developed that allow some antihydrogen atoms to be created at low enough kinetic energies that they can be held inside magnetic minimum neutral atom traps. With confinement times of many minutes possible, it has become feasible to perform experiments to probe the properties of the antiatom for the first time. We review the experimental progress in this area, outline some of the motivation for studying basic aspects of antimatter physics and provide an outlook of where we might expect this field to go in the coming years.