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Over the last decades it has become routine to form beams of positrons and antiprotons and to use them to produce trapped samples of both species for a variety of purposes. Positrons can be captured efficiently, for instance using a buffer-gas system, and in such quantities to form dense, single component plasmas useful for antihydrogen formation. The latter is possible using developments of techniques for dynamically capturing and then cooling antiprotons ejected from the Antiproton Decelerator at CERN. The antiprotons can then be manipulated by cloud compression and evaporative cooling to form tailored plasmas. We will review recent advances that have allowed antihydrogen atoms to be confined for the first time in a shallow magnetic minimum neutral atom trap superimposed upon the region in which the antiparticles are held and mixed. A new mixing technique has been developed to help achieve this using autoresonant excitation of the centreofmass longitudinal motion of an antiproton cloud. This allows efficient antihydrogen formation without imparting excess energy to the antiprotons and helps enhance the probability of trapping the anti-atom.

Simple scaling laws strongly suggest that for antihydrogen relevant parameters, quadrupole magnetic fields will transport particles into, or near to, the trap walls. Consequently quadrupoles are a poor choice for antihydrogen trapping. Higher order multipoles lead to much less transport.

The ALPHA experiment aims to trap antihydrogen as the next crucial step towards a precise CPT test, by a spectroscopic comparison of antihydrogen with hydrogen. The experiment will retain the salient techniques developed by the ATHENA collaboration during the previous phase of antihydrogen experiments at the antiproton decelerator (AD) at CERN. The collaboration has identified the key problems in adding a neutral antiatom trap to the previously developed experimental configuration. The solutions identified by ALPHA are described in this paper.

Inelastic collisions with CO2 buffer gas cool a pure electron gas in a Penning‐Malmberg trap at low magnetic fields. 0.6 eV electrons are cooled by down to 30% of their original temperature.