Revolutionary discovery: detecting antimatter in real time!

Revolutionary discovery: detecting antimatter in real time!

Researchers at CERN have made significant progress in antimatter research by using smartphone photosensors to annihilate antimatter in real time. This innovative technology, which was developed for international AEgIS cooperation, comes from scientists at the Technical University of Munich (TUM). With the help of these new devices, the research detects antiproton annihilations with an impressive accuracy of almost 0.6 micrometers, improving previous methods by a factor of 35. These advances are crucial as the AEgIS collaboration aims to precisely measure the free fall of antihydrogen in Earth's gravity field, which was previously only possible with enormous technical challenges.

A horizontal antihydrogen jet is generated, the vertical fall distance of which is measured using a Moiré deflectometer. Dr. Francesco Guatieri, leader of the study, highlights the need for a detector with high spatial resolution. The implementation of 60 smartphone chips in the Optical Photon and Antimatter Imager (OPHANIM) is a key to achieving this high precision. Previously, photographic plates were used as the only way to accurately measure, but without the ability to take real-time measurements. The new solution has already passed successful tests on antiprotons and is now being applied to antihydrogen. The results of this research were published in the journal Science Advances and mark a crucial step in antimatter research.

The basics of antimatter

Antimatter has the same mass as matter but has an opposite electrical charge and spin. According to Einstein's general theory of relativity, gravity should affect matter and antimatter identically. However, no direct measurement of the falling speed of antimatter has been carried out so far because the production and capture of antimatter are associated with considerable difficulties. The AEgIS collaboration at CERN's Antiproton Decelerator (AD) recently published a landmark paper in *Communications Physics* that describes a milestone in the production of antihydrogen.

New techniques developed back in 2018 enabled the pulsed production of antihydrogen atoms, allowing precise timing of their formation. AEgIS spokesman Michael Doser noted that this is the first time that pulsed formation of antihydrogen has occurred at relevant times. Antihydrogen is and has been produced and studied exclusively at CERN, making it ideal for testing the effects of gravity and the fundamental properties of antimatter.

Future perspectives

The first low-energy production reports of antihydrogen date back to 2002, thanks to the ATHENA and ATRAP collaborations. The ALPHA collaboration has made progress in producing, manipulating and capturing larger quantities of antihydrogen. AEgIS used a “charge exchange” process triggered by a laser pulse to generate antihydrogen, allowing time determination with an uncertainty of around 100 ns. Further steps to measure gravity's influence on antimatter are required, including forming a pulsed jet, increasing the amounts of antihydrogen, and cooling the atoms.

In the coming years, the ALPHA, AEgIS and GBAR experiments plan to measure the falling speed of anti-atoms with an accuracy of 1%. These projects are closely linked to the new ELENA synchrotron, which produces extremely low-energy antiprotons. While physicists believe it is unlikely that antimatter experiences an opposite gravitational pull compared to matter, precise measurements could reveal subtle differences.