The ELENA project at CERN

TL;DR

The ELENA project at CERN is a new low-energy antiproton ring designed to enhance antimatter research, enabling more precise experiments on anti-hydrogen and addressing fundamental questions about matter-antimatter asymmetry.

Contribution

This paper introduces the ELENA project, a novel 30-meter ring at CERN that decelerates antiprotons to facilitate advanced antimatter experiments.

Findings

Construction of the ELENA ring approved in 2011

ELENA will decelerate antiprotons from 5.3 MeV to 100 keV

Expected to improve antimatter research capabilities

Abstract

CERN has a longstanding tradition of pursuing fundamental physics on extreme low and high energy scales. The present physics knowledge is successfully described by the Standard Model and the General Relativity. In the anti-matter regime many predictions of this established theory still remain experimentally unverified and one of the most fundamental open problems in physics concerns the question of asymmetry between particles: why is the observable and visible universe apparently composed almost entirely of matter and not of anti-matter? There is a huge interest in the very compelling scientiic case for anti-hydrogen and low energy anti-proton physics, here to name especially the Workshop on New Opportunities in the Physics Landscape at CERN which was convened in May 2009 by the CERN Directorate and culminated in the decision for the final approval of the construction of the Extra Low ENergy Antiproton (ELENA) ring by the Research Board in June 2011. ELENA is a CERN project aiming to construct a small 30 m circumference synchrotron to further decelerate anti-protons from the Antiproton Decelerator (AD) from 5.3 MeV down to 100 keV.