Antimatter and Precision Measurements
Welcome to the homepage of the ERC project group STEP
Antiparticles are rarely found in nature – we observe them, e.g. in the nuclear beta-decay and in high energy cosmic rays, however they quickly annihilate in our world of matter. In contrast to our experience, the Standard Model of particle physics is symmetric regarding particles and antiparticles. The interest of my research is to compare conjugate particles and antiparticles in high-precision measurements to test this symmetry, and look for symmetry violation manifesting itself in different observations in particle antiparticle systems. To this end, I am interested in developing new antiparticle traps and measurement methods to improve the sensitivity of antiparticle precision measurements. Currently, we are developing a transportable antiproton trap to improve the high-precision charge-to-mass ratio comparison of the proton and the antiproton.
Research projects:
STEP: Symmetry Tests in Experiments with Portable antiprotons
Goals:
- Development of transportable antiproton traps for precision experiments
- Developing methods improving antiproton precision measurements
g-factor proton / BASE-Mainz experiment:
Goals:
-
-
- Development of sympathetic cooling methods for protons and antiprotons
- Measuring the proton g-factor with highest precision
- Development of sympathetic cooling methods for protons and antiprotons
-
The BASE experiment at CERN:
(see also: BASE Collaboration web page, RIKEN FSL web page)
Recent experimental results:
-
- High-precision measurements of the antiproton magnetic moment
The most precise measurement with 1.5 ppb uncertainty - Antiproton dark matter searches
First direct limits on axion-antiproton coupling - High-precision comparison of the proton and antiproton charge-to-mass ratio
Our first measurement with 69 ppt uncertainty - Antiproton lifetime studies
See this article for details
- High-precision measurements of the antiproton magnetic moment