AEgIS
"I just wanted to know what would happen if ... "
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What does the acronym stand for?:
Antihydrogen Experiment: Gravity, Interferometry, Spectroscopy
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CERN facilities:
AEgIS (AD-6) is one of the experiments at the Antimatter Factory
The world’s one and only “Antimatter Factory”, located at CERN in France/Switzerland. -
About your project:
All fundamental processes in nature (on the level of atoms, and even subatomic scales) are quite well described by the “standard model of physics”. One key feature of this model is that each matter particle (proton, neutron, electron, even the quarks) has a twin particle, an anti-particle (antiproton, antineutron, anti-electron [= positrons] or anti-quarks).
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Every-time matter is being created, obeying the famous equation E = mc^2, half of the produced mass “m” is actually distributed to antimatter. We thus expect that during the creation of the entire universe half of the formed mass should consist of antimatter.
Looking around (with telescopes), we do not find a single trace of this half. We call it the universal matter-antimatter imbalance, and this motivates the research of this topic. There must be a difference between the two halfs, and it should manifest in a small process we are yet to discover. So let’s look on how antimatter behaves in a gravitational field, or let’s look what happens when you shine lasers on anti-atoms (spectroscopy) – will there be any difference?
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Current project status:
AEgIS has entered its second phase after successfully creating a pulsed source of antihydrogen atoms in 2018. This pulse had a time-spread of only 250 nanoseconds (0.00000025 sec) and was well suited to let it horizontally traverse in a gravitational field (generated by Earth; others would say we simply let it fall). However, in phase one the amount of formed atoms was very small (only 1 atom every 20 trials), so it would have been very difficult to built enough statistics.Hence, we optimized our entire apparatus, polished all the corners away, and from 2022 we aim at creating an intense pulsed source of antihydrogen atoms.
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Further information:
