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A passive superconducting shield was proposed earlier to realize a high-field (3-4 T) septum magnet for the Future Circular Collider. This paper presents the experimental results of a potential shield material, a NbTi/Nb/Cu multilayer sheet. A cylindrical shield was constructed from two halves, each consisting of 4 layers with a total thickness of 3.2~mm, and inserted into the bore of a spare LHC dipole corrector magnet (MCBY). At 4.2~K, up to about 3.1~T at the shield's surface only a leakage field of 12.5~mT was measured inside the shield. This can be attributed to the mis-alignment of the two half cylinders, as confirmed by finite element simulations. With a better configuration we estimate the shield's attenuation to be better than $\mathbf{4\times 10^{-5}}$, acceptable for the intended application. Above 3.1~T the field penetrated smoothly. Below that limit no flux jumps were observed even at the highest achievable ramp rate of more than 50~mT/s at the shield's surface. A 'degaussing' cycle was used to eliminate the effects of the field trapped in the thick wall of the shield, which could otherwise distort the homogeneous field pattern at the extracted beam's position. At 1.9~K the shield's performance was superior to that at 4.2~K, but it suffered from flux jumps.

Physical laws are believed to be invariant under the combined transformations of charge, parity and time reversal (CPT symmetry). This implies that an antimatter particle has exactly the same mass and absolute value of charge as its particle counterpart. Metastable antiprotonic helium ($\bar{p}{\rm He}^+$) is a three-body atom consisting of a normal helium nucleus, an electron in its ground state and an antiproton ($\bar{p}$) occupying a Rydberg state with high principal and angular momentum quantum numbers, respectively $n$ and $\ell$, such that $n\sim\ell\sim 38$. These atoms are amenable to precision laser spectroscopy, the results of which can in principle be used to determine the antiproton-to-electron mass ratio and to constrain the equality between the antiproton and proton charges and masses. Here we report two-photon spectroscopy of antiprotonic helium, in which $\bar{p}{\rm ^3He^+}$ and $\bar{p}{\rm ^4He^+}$ isotopes are irradiated by two counter-propagating laser beams. This excites nonlinear, two-photon transitions of the antiproton of the type $(n,\ell)\rightarrow (n-2,\ell-2)$ at deep-ultraviolet wavelengths ($\lambda$=139.8, 193.0 and 197.0nm), which partly cancel the Doppler broadening of the laser resonance caused by the thermal motion of the atoms. The resulting narrow spectral lines allowed us to measure three transition frequencies with fractional precisions of 2.3-5 parts in $10^9$. By comparing the results with three-body quantum electrodynamics calculations, we derived an antiproton-to-electron mass ratio of 1,836.1526736(23), where the parenthetical error represents one standard deviation. This agrees with the proton-to-electron value known to a similar precision.

In this work we describe the latest results for the measurements of the hyperfine structure of antiprotonic helium-3. Two out of four measurable super-super-hyperfine SSHF transition lines of the (n,L)=(36,34) state of antiprotonic helium-3 were observed. The measured frequencies of the individual transitions are 11.12548(08) GHz and 11.15793(13) GHz, with an increased precision of about 43% and 25% respectively compared to our first measurements with antiprotonic helium-3 [S. Friedreich et al., Phys. Lett. B 700 (2011) 1--6]. They are less than 0.5 MHz higher with respect to the most recent theoretical values, still within their estimated errors. Although the experimental uncertainty for the difference of 0.03245(15) GHz between these frequencies is large as compared to that of theory, its measured value also agrees with theoretical calculations. The rates for collisions between antiprotonic helium and helium atoms have been assessed through comparison with simulations, resulting in an elastic collision rate of gamma_e = 3.41 +- 0.62 MHz and an inelastic collision rate of gamma_i = 0.51 +- 0.07 MHz., Comment: 15 pages, 9 figures. arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1102.5286