Speaker
Description
The striking imbalance of matter and antimatter in our universe is one of the hottest topics of modern physics, which inspires experiments to compare the fundamental properties of matter-antimatter conjugates at lowest energy and with great precision. The BASE collaboration at the antiproton decelerator of CERN is performing such high-precision comparisons with protons and antiprotons. Using advanced, ultra-stable, cryogenic particle traps and superconducting detectors with single particle sensitivity, we have performed the most precise measurement of the proton-to-antiproton charge-to-mass ratio with a fractional precision of 11 significant digits [1]. In another measurement, we have invented a novel spectroscopy method, which allowed for the first ultra-high precision measurement of the antiproton magnetic moment with a fractional precision of 1.5 parts in a billion [2]. Together with our recent measurement of the proton magnetic moment [3] this improves the precision of previous experiments [4] by more than a factor of 3000.
In my talk I will review the recent achievements of BASE and will outline strategies to further improve our high-precision studies of matter-antimatter symmetry. This outlook will involve the implementation of sympathetic cooling of antiprotons using quantum logic methods, as well as a motivation and first design studies for transportable antiproton traps.
[1] S. Ulmer et al., Nature 524, 196 (2015).
[2] C. Smorra et al., Eur. Phys. Journ. Spec. Top. 224, 16 (2015).
[3] G. Schneider et al., Science 358, 1081 (2017).
[4] J. DiSciacca et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 110, 130801 (2013).
