ATRAP Experiment Makes World's Most Precise Measurement of Antiproton Magnetic Moment
Thursday, March 28, 2013 - 09:00
in Physics & Chemistry
Geneva, 25 March 2013. In today's Physical Review Letters, the Antihydrogen TRAP (ATRAP1) experiment at CERN2's Antiproton Decelerator (AD) reports a new measurement of the antiprotonmagnetic moment made with an unprecedented uncertainty of 4.4 parts per million (ppm). This result is 680 times more precise than previous measurements. The unusual increase in precision is due to the experiment's ability to trap individual protons and antiprotons, and to using a huge magnetic gradient to gain sensitivity to the tiny magnetic moment. ATRAP's new result is partly an attempt to understand the matter-antimatter imbalance of the universe, one of the great mysteries of modern physics.