Speaker
Description
ASACUSA plans to measure the ground-state hyperfine structure of antihydrogen at low magnetic field using the Rabi method, for which a slow atomic beam ($v < 1500\,\mathrm{m/s}$) is needed. We make antihydrogen by slowly combining large amounts of positrons and antiprotons in a Penning-Malmberg trap. The antiprotons are "mixed" with the positrons for $60\,\mathrm{s}$, during which time about $100$ antihydrogen atoms leave the trap as a beam. The atoms are mostly in Rydberg states (principal quantum number $n > 20$) and can be ionized by a strong electric field. We study the binding energy of the atoms by varying the strength of the electric field, and we measure time-of-flight by pulsing the field to chop the beam. This presentation will cover our recent measurements and progress toward making a slower beam with more atoms in the ground state.
