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Investigations on antimatter allow us to shed light on fundamental issues of contemporary physics. The only antiatom presently available, antihydrogen, is produced making use of the Antiproton Decelerator (AD) facility at CERN. International collaborations currently on the floor (ALPHA, ASACUSA and ATRAP) have succeeded in producing antihydrogen and are now involved in its confinement and manipulation. The AEGIS experiment is currently completing the commissioning of the apparatus which will generate and manipulate antiatoms. The present paper, after a report on the main results achieved with antihydrogen physics, gives an overview of the AEGIS experiment, describes its current status and discusses its first target.

The exotic nucleus 8He is investigated by means of the measurement of the angular distributions of the elastic channel and the 6He and 4He fragment yields produced in the collision with a 208Pb target at two energies around the Coulomb barrier, 16 and 22 MeV. The experiment was performed at the GANIL-SPIRAL facility, with the aim of extracting information about the structure of 8He and the relevant reaction mechanisms. In this contribution, details of the experimental setup and preliminary data on elastic cross sections are reported.

The experimental study of the fusion of light neutron-rich nucleus 8He with 206Pb is reported in this work. A fusion stack of 206Pb targets has been used for this study. The most prominent evaporation residue (210Po), which has half-life of 138 days and decays by alpha emission, is populated in the reaction. Radiochemical analysis technique is used to extract the yield of this evaporation residue.

The barrier distributions for the 20Ne+58,60,61Ni systems were experimentally determined. In the 58Ni case one observes a distinct “structure” in the distribution (two peaks) which is partially damped for 60Ni and completely smoothed out for 61Ni. It seems that smoothing is caused by non-collective excitations of the target nuclei.

The weak equivalence principle states that the motion of a body in a gravitational field is independent of its structure or composition. This postulate of general relativity has been tested to very high precision with ordinary matter, but no relevant experimental verification with antimatter has ever been carried out. The AEGIS experiment will measure the gravitational acceleration of antihydrogen to ultimately 1% precision. For this purpose, a pulsed horizontal antihydrogen beam with a velocity of several 100 m s−1 will be produced. Its vertical deflection due to gravity will be detected by a setup consisting of material gratings coupled with a position-sensitive detector, operating as a moiré deflectometer or an atom interferometer. The AEGIS experiment is installed at CERN’s Antiproton Decelerator, currently the only facility in the world which produces copious amounts of low-energy antiprotons. The construction of the setup has been going on since 2010 and is nearing completion. A proof-of-principle experiment with antiprotons has demonstrated that the deflection of antiparticles by a few μm due to an external force can be detected. Technological and scientific development pertaining to specific challenges of the experiment, such as antihydrogen formation by positronium charge exchange or the position-sensitive detection of antihydrogen annihilations, is ongoing.