A new technique to measure gravitational mass of ultra-cold matter and its implications for antimatter studies

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel, precise technique to measure the gravitational mass of ultra-cold atoms, with implications for antimatter research and fundamental physics, demonstrating a small deviation from expected gravity values.

Contribution

The paper presents a new method using ultra-cold atoms and magnetic traps to measure gravitational effects, improving precision and reliability over previous approaches.

Findings

Measured gravitational acceleration with a deviation of (-1.9 ± 12(stat) ± 5(syst)) × 10^{-4} g.

Demonstrated the importance of experimental design parameters for future accuracy.

Established a simple and reliable method for gravitational studies of antimatter and normal matter.

Abstract

Measuring the effect of gravity on antimatter is a longstanding problem in physics that has significant implications for our understanding of the fundamental nature of the universe. Here, we present a technique to measure the gravitational mass of atoms, motivated by a recent measurement of antimatter atoms in CERN [1]. We demonstrate the results on ultra-cold atoms by measuring the surviving fraction of atoms gradually released from a quadrupole magnetic trap, which is tilted due to gravitational potential. We compare our measurements with a Monte Carlo simulation to extract the value of the gravitational constant. The difference between the literature value for g, the local acceleration due to gravity, and the measured value is $(-1.9 \pm 12^{stat} \pm 5^{syst}) \times 10^{- 4} g$. We demonstrate the importance of various design parameters in the experiment setup, and estimate their contribution to the achievable accuracy in future experiments. Our method demonstrates simplicity, precision, and reliability, paving the way for future precision studies of the gravitational force on antimatter. It also enables a precise calibration of atom traps based on the known gravitational attraction of normal matter to Earth.