An atomic hydrogen beam to test ASACUSA's apparatus for antihydrogen spectroscopy

TL;DR

This paper reports the successful testing of an apparatus using atomic hydrogen to prepare for antihydrogen hyperfine spectroscopy, aiming to test CPT symmetry by comparing hydrogen and antihydrogen transitions.

Contribution

The authors developed and demonstrated a cold polarized atomic hydrogen source for offline testing of antihydrogen spectroscopy apparatus.

Findings

Observed hyperfine structure transitions of atomic hydrogen

Validated apparatus functionality in Earth's magnetic field

Prepared groundwork for antihydrogen CPT tests

Abstract

The ASACUSA collaboration aims to measure the ground state hyperfine splitting (GS-HFS) of antihydrogen, the antimatter pendant to atomic hydrogen. Comparisons of the corresponding transitions in those two systems will provide sensitive tests of the CPT symmetry, the combination of the three discrete symmetries charge conjugation, parity, and time reversal. For offline tests of the GS-HFS spectroscopy apparatus we constructed a source of cold polarised atomic hydrogen. In these proceedings we report the successful observation of the hyperfine structure transitions of atomic hydrogen with our apparatus in the earth's magnetic field.