ABSTRACT
Antihydrogen, the lightest atom consisting purely of antimatter, is an ideal laboratory to study the CPT symmetry by comparison with hydrogen. With respect to absolute precision, transitions within the ground-state hyperfine structure (GS-HFS) are most appealing by virtue of their small energy separation. ASACUSA proposed employing a beam of cold antihydrogen atoms in a Rabi-type experiment, to determine the GS-HFS in a field-free region. Here we present a measurement of the zero-field hydrogen GS-HFS using the spectroscopy apparatus of ASACUSA's antihydrogen experiment. The measured value of νHF=1,420,405,748.4(3.4) (1.6) Hz with a relative precision of 2.7 × 10-9 constitutes the most precise determination of this quantity in a beam and verifies the developed spectroscopy methods for the antihydrogen HFS experiment to the p.p.b. level. Together with the recently presented observation of antihydrogen atoms 2.7 m downstream of the production region, the prerequisites for a measurement with antihydrogen are now available within the ASACUSA collaboration.
ABSTRACT
Antihydrogen, a positron bound to an antiproton, is the simplest antiatom. Its counterpart-hydrogen--is one of the most precisely investigated and best understood systems in physics research. High-resolution comparisons of both systems provide sensitive tests of CPT symmetry, which is the most fundamental symmetry in the Standard Model of elementary particle physics. Any measured difference would point to CPT violation and thus to new physics. Here we report the development of an antihydrogen source using a cusp trap for in-flight spectroscopy. A total of 80 antihydrogen atoms are unambiguously detected 2.7 m downstream of the production region, where perturbing residual magnetic fields are small. This is a major step towards precision spectroscopy of the ground-state hyperfine splitting of antihydrogen using Rabi-like beam spectroscopy.
