• Open Access

Pulsed production of cold protonium in Penning traps

Sebastian Gerber, Michael Doser, and Daniel Comparat
Phys. Rev. A 100, 063418 – Published 16 December 2019

Abstract

Precision comparison experiments on bound states of matter and antimatter rely on the production of corresponding systems at low temperatures and in sufficient numbers. In this paper we propose a scheme for the pulsed production of highly excited protonium (Pn) in a Penning-Malmberg trap at low kinetic energies of tens of meV. The scheme relies on the resonant-charge-exchange reaction H*+p¯Pn*+e where Rydberg excited hydrogen and antiprotons (p¯) interact to form Pn*. The reagent H(n=30,l=2) is created from laser photodetached and excited hydrogen anions (H), which are initially trapped and mixed in a plasma together with electrons and antiprotons at low kinetic energies. We discuss a three-step pulsed laser excitation using rate equations. A semiclassical Monte Carlo approach leads to a formation rate of 105 Pn per 20 s when assuming a production temperature of 100 K. The formed Pn are internally excited in states with average principal quantum number n1200 having lifetimes that can reach seconds. The proposed scheme is therefore particularly interesting for experiments aiming at the study of cold antimatter and purely baryonic systems for precision experiments (charge neutrality, gravity, spectroscopy), as performed at the antiproton decelerator facility at CERN.

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  • Received 8 July 2019

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevA.100.063418

Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article's title, journal citation, and DOI.

Published by the American Physical Society

Physics Subject Headings (PhySH)

Atomic, Molecular & OpticalPlasma PhysicsParticles & Fields

Authors & Affiliations

Sebastian Gerber* and Michael Doser

  • CERN, European Laboratory for Particle Physics, 1211 Geneva, Switzerland

Daniel Comparat

  • Laboratoire Aimé Cotton, CNRS, Université Paris-Sud, ENS Cachan, Bât. 505, 91405 Orsay, France

  • *sebastian.gerber@cern.ch

Article Text

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Issue

Vol. 100, Iss. 6 — December 2019

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