Search

We discuss two complementary strategies to search for light dark matter (LDM) exploiting the positron beam possibly available in the future at Jefferson Laboratory. LDM is a new compelling hypothesis that identifies dark matter with new sub-GeV "hidden sector" states, neutral under standard model interactions and interacting with our world through a new force. Accelerator-based searches at the intensity frontier are uniquely suited to explore it. Thanks to the high intensity and the high energy of the CEBAF (Continuous Electron Beam Accelerator Facility) beam, and relying on a novel LDM production mechanism via positron annihilation on target atomic electrons, the proposed strategies will allow us to explore new regions in the LDM parameters space, thoroughly probing the LDM hypothesis as well as more general hidden sector scenarios., 11 pages, 8 figures. Prepared for submission in EPJA. This work supersedes the corresponding contribution in arXiv:2007.15081. Added aknowledgement to Jefferson Lab

In order to test CPT symmetry between antihydrogen and its counterpart hydrogen, the ASACUSA collaboration plans to perform high precision microwave spectroscopy of ground-state hyperfine splitting of antihydrogen atom in-flight. We have developed an apparatus (“cusp trap”) which consists of a superconducting anti-Helmholtz coil and multiple ring electrodes. For the preparation of slow antiprotons and positrons, Penning- Malmberg type traps were utilized. The spectrometer line was positioned downstream of the cusp trap. At the end of the beamline, an antihydrogen beam detector was located, which comprises an inorganic Bismuth Germanium Oxide (BGO) single-crystal scintillator housed in a vacuum duct and surrounding plastic scintillators. A significant fraction of antihydrogen atoms flowing out the cusp trap were detected.

In this article, the first experimental evidence is presented for the reflection of a conspicuous fraction (∼ 30%) of a beam of low energy antiprotons by an aluminum wall. This rare evidence comes from the new analysis of a set of annihilations of antiprotons stopped in rarefied helium gas after hitting the end wall of the apparatus. These results, supported by Monte Carlo simulations, show that the interaction between the antiprotons at low energies ( $\lesssim 10$ keV) and the solid surface is dominated by Rutherford-type scattering on aluminum nuclei, and contradict the common belief according to which the interactions between matter and antimatter are dominated by the reciprocally destructive phenomenon of annihilation.

The study of the antiproton ( $\bar {p}$ ) annihilation cross section on nuclei at low energies (eV-MeV region) has implications for fundamental cosmology as well as for nuclear physics. Concerning the former, different models try to explain the matter/antimatter asymmetry in the universe assuming the existence of the so-called “islands” where antinucleon-nucleon annihilations occur in the border region (Cohen et al. Astrophys. J. 495, 539–549, 1998), while, from the nuclear physics point of view, the annihilation process is a valuable tool to evaluate the neutron/proton ratio in order to probe the external region of the nucleus (Gupta et al. Nucl. Phys. B 70(3), 414–424, 1974). The existing data of antinucleon-nucleon (or -nucleus) annihilation cross-sections are mainly confined to energies above ≈1 MeV, while the cross section measured at LEAR in the 80’s-90’s (mostly with light targets Agnello et al. Phys. Lett. B 256, 349–353, 1991; Bertin et al. Phys. Lett. B 369, 77–85, 1996; Bertin et al. Phys. Lett. B 414, 220–228, 1997; Zenoni et al. Phys. Lett. B 461, 405–412, 1999; Bianconi et al. Phys. Lett. B 481, 194–198, 2000; Bianconi et al. Phys. Lett. B 492, 254–258, 2000) showed an unexpected behaviour for energies below 1 MeV (Bianconi et al. Phys. Lett. B 483, 353–359, 2000; Bianconi et al. Phys. Rev. C 62, 014611-7, 2000; Batty et al. Nucl. Phys. A 689, 721–740, 2001). The results showed a saturation with the atomic mass number against the A 2/3 trend which is observed for higher energies (being A the target mass number). The ASACUSA collaboration at CERN recently measured antiproton annihilation cross section on different kinds of nuclei with a $\bar {p}$ kinetic energy of 5.3 MeV (Bianconi et al. Phys. Lett. B 704, 461–466, 2011; Corradini et al. Nucl. Instr. Methods A 711, 12–20, 2013). Such results proved compatibility with the black-disk model with the Coulomb correction. But till now experimental difficulties prevented the investigation at energies below ≈1 MeV. In 2012, the 100 keV region has been investigated for the first time (Aghai-Khozani et al. Eur. Phys. J. Plus 127, 125–128, 2012). We present here the first preliminary results of this experiment.

The ASACUSA collaboration of CERN has recently irradiated antiprotonic helium atoms with two counter-propagating laser beams. This excited some non-linear two-photon transitions of the antiproton at the deep UV wavelengths λ = 139.8-197.0 nm. The counterpropagating geometry of the laser beams reduced the thermal Doppler broadening of the observed resonances. Their narrow spectral lines allowed the measurement of three transition frequencies with fractional precisions of 2.3-5 parts in 10 9 . By comparing the results with three-body QED calculations, the antiproton-to-electron mass ratio was derived as 1836.1526736(23).

The aim of the ASACUSA-CUSP experiment at CERN is to produce a cold, polarised antihydrogen beam and perform a high precision measurement of the ground-state hyperfine transition frequency of the antihydrogen atom and compare it with that of the hydrogen atom using the same spectroscopic beam line. Towards this goal a significant step was successfully accomplished: synthesised antihydrogen atoms have been produced in a CUSP magnetic configuration and detected at the end of our spectrometer beam line in 2012 [1]. During a long shut down at CERN the ASACUSA-CUSP experiment had been renewed by introducing a new double-CUSP magnetic configuration and a new semi-cylindrical tracking detector (AMT) [2], and by improving the transport feature of low energy antiproton beams. The new tracking detector monitors the antihydrogen synthesis during the mixing cycle of antiprotons and positrons. In this work the latest results and improvements of the antihydrogen synthesis will be presented including highlights from the last beam time.

The results of the annihilation cross sections measurement of 5.3 MeV antiprotons on nickel, tin, platinum and Mylar targets performed by the ASACUSA Collaboration at CERN are presented and compared with the existing data and models. From the experimental point of view the presented data are the first measurement of antinucleon annihilation cross sections at low energies obtained with a pulsed beam. This results open the road for the next measurements at the very low energies of the order of 100 keV that are in progress by the ASACUSA Collaboration. The experimental method foreseen for the 100 keV measurement is illustrated.

The ASACUSA (the Atomic Spectroscopy And Collisions Using Slow Antiprotons) collaboration is planning to measure the cross sections of antiproton annihilations at kinetic energy 100 keV on targets of various mass numbers (C, Ni, Sn, and Pt) using the Antiproton Decelerator (AD) of CERN. No previous measurement exists in this region where the A-dependence of the cross section is expected to deviate from the A\(^{\frac{2}{3}}\) (Batty et al, Nucl Phys A 689:721, 2001) as reported by the Obelix collaboration. A beam profile monitor based on secondary electron emission with a grid of electrode pads fabricated on an FR4-type glass-epoxy circuit board was developed for this measurement. The advantage of this kind of detector is that it is simple, lightweight, and low cost. It was used to measure the spatial profile of 100-ns-long beam pulses containing > 6 × 104 antiprotons with an active area of 40 mm × 40 mm and a spatial resolution of 4 mm.

π-4He interactions at 106MeV, with two secondary charged particles in the final state, have been studied using a self-shunted streamer chamber in a 0.65T magnetic field and equipped with two CCD videocameras for obtaining digitized stereo-images of nuclear events occurring within the fiducial volume of the streamer chamber. Branching ratios for the various interaction channels are deduced. Evidence is presented for a reaction channel involving a γ produced in the final state, as well as for the first observation of direct Δ- -resonance production. Cross-section distributions for the elastic and quasi-elastic interaction channels are also reported.

The ATHENA experiment at the Antiproton Decelerator facility at CERN aims at testing CPT symmetry with antihydrogen. An overview of the experiment, together with preliminary results of development towards the production of slow antihydrogen are reported.

The study of CPT invariance with the highest achievable precision in all particle sectors is of fundamental importance for physics. Equally important is the question of the gravitational acceleration of antimatter. In recent years, impressive progress has been achieved at the Low Energy Antiproton Ring (LEAR) at CERN in capturing antiprotons in specially designed Penning traps, in cooling them to energies of a few milli-electron volts, and in storing them for hours in a small volume of space. Positrons have been accumulated in large numbers in similar traps, and low energy positron or positronium beams have been generated. Finally, steady progress has been made in trapping and cooling neutral atoms. Thus the ingredients to form antihydrogen at rest are at hand. We propose to investigate the different methods to form antihydrogen at low energy, and to utilize the best of these methods to capture a number of antihydrogen atoms sufficient for spectroscopic studies in a magnetostatic trap. Once antihydrogen atoms have been captured at low energy, spectroscopic methods can be applied to interrogate their atomic structure with extremely high precision and compare it to its normal matter counterpart, the hydrogen atom. Especially the 1S-2S transition, with a lifetime of the excited state of 122 ms and thereby a natural linewidth of 5 parts in 1016, offers in principle the possibility to directly compare matter and antimatter properties at a level of 1 part in 1018. Additionally, comparison of the gravitational masses of hydrogen and antihydrogen, using either ballistic or spectroscopic methods, can provide direct experimental tests of the Weak Equivalence Principle for antimatter at a high precision.

The possibility of selecting the initial angular-momentum state from which antiproton-proton annihilation at rest can occur can be a fundamental tool in meson spectroscopy. With the OBELIX detector different target systems have been employed, ranging fromS-wave toP-wave dominance. The preliminary results both on meson spectroscopy and branching ratio measurements are discussed.

A preliminary study of\(\bar np\) three-prong annihilations into the channels K− K+ π+ and π− π+ π+ π0 is presented for ∼ 100–297 MeV/c\(\bar n\) momenta. The extracted φπ+/ωπ+ production ratio shows that also in this channel, never measured before using an\(\bar np\) beam, the OZI rule is strongly violated.

A study of\(\bar np\) in-flight annihilations is presented. The 4π invariant mass spectrum resulting from the analysis of the five-prong exclusive events, following the annihilation of ∼ (100–297) MeV/c\(\bar n\), reveals, besides a large structure centred at ∼ 1500 MeV/c2, some evidences for a new state around 1660 MeV/c2.