Thursday, February 26, 2009, 16:00
WHGA Auditorium
M. Doser, CERN
Abstract:
Experimental studies of Antihydrogen have a short history, but an ambitious
future: a first generation of experiments which produced large numbers of
antihydrogen atoms for the first time in 2002 has given place to a second
wave of experiments which are attempting the next steps of trapping and
cooling antihydrogen atoms, with the long term goal of carrying out
precision laser spectroscopy comparisons of the spectra of hydrogen and
antihydrogen, and thus perform a precision test of the CPT symmetry. In
parallel, advances in other fields have made possible the concept of a beam
of antihydrogen atoms, which opens the door to measuring the gravitational
interaction of (neutral) antimatter. The AEGIS experiment, which in a first
step aims to reach a 1% precision on the gravitational interaction of
antihydrogen by measuring its free fall over its parabolic trajectory, will
be presented, and the technologies from a variety of fields on which it
relies will be discussed.