Confinement of antihydrogen for 1000 seconds

TL;DR

This paper reports the groundbreaking achievement of confining antihydrogen atoms for 1000 seconds, enabling future precision tests of fundamental symmetries and gravitational effects in antimatter.

Contribution

The authors demonstrate antihydrogen trapping for 1000 seconds, significantly surpassing previous confinement durations, and provide the first measurement of the energy distribution of trapped antihydrogen.

Findings

Antihydrogen atoms can be confined for 1000 seconds.

Most trapped antihydrogen reach the ground state.

Energy distribution measurements aid systematic studies.

Abstract

Atoms made of a particle and an antiparticle are unstable, usually surviving less than a microsecond. Antihydrogen, made entirely of antiparticles, is believed to be stable, and it is this longevity that holds the promise of precision studies of matter-antimatter symmetry. We have recently demonstrated trapping of antihydrogen atoms by releasing them after a confinement time of 172 ms. A critical question for future studies is: how long can anti-atoms be trapped? Here we report the observation of anti-atom confinement for 1000 s, extending our earlier results by nearly four orders of magnitude. Our calculations indicate that most of the trapped anti-atoms reach the ground state. Further, we report the first measurement of the energy distribution of trapped antihydrogen which, coupled with detailed comparisons with simulations, provides a key tool for the systematic investigation of trapping dynamics. These advances open up a range of experimental possibilities, including precision studies of CPT symmetry and cooling to temperatures where gravitational effects could become apparent.