Physicists at CERN have invented a novel particle trap that allows them to measure the magnetic moments of antiprotons with unprecedented precision. The BASE collaboration, an international team of researchers, used this new trap to find that the magnetic moments of antiparticles differ from those of their matter counterparts by a maximum of 10-9.
This breakthrough has significant implications for understanding the universe’s antimatter-matter asymmetry. According to the Standard Model, the universe should contain equal amounts of antimatter and matter. However, we observe only tiny amounts of antimatter, suggesting that there must be some fundamental difference between particles and their antiparticles.
The BASE team aims to measure the magnetic moment of the antiproton with extreme precision and compare it with the proton’s magnetic moment. To achieve this, they employ Penning traps, which use magnetic and electric fields to confine negatively charged antiprotons for extended periods.
One key innovation is the “Maxwell’s demon cooling double trap,” which enables them to cool individual antiprotons to extremely low temperatures (200 mK) in just eight minutes. This is a significant improvement over previous techniques, which took 15 hours to achieve this feat.
The new instrument allows researchers to prepare only the coldest antiprotons for measurement while rejecting warmer particles, reducing the overall measurement time from almost 10 years to just one month. The team has already demonstrated the effectiveness of their trap by measuring a difference in magnetic moments between protons and antiprotons at a precision of 10-9.
The implications of this breakthrough are far-reaching, with potential applications in phase-sensitive detection methods or spin state analysis. The BASE team hopes to further improve the accuracy of their measurements, aiming for an error rate of 10-10 in their next campaign. Their work has been published in Physical Review Letters.
Source: https://physicsworld.com/a/improved-antiproton-trap-could-shed-more-light-on-antimatter-matter-asymmetry/