Buffer-gas cooling of antiprotonic helium to 1.5 to 1.7 K, and antiproton-to–electron mass ratio

• Autores: Masaki Hori, Hossein Aghai Khozani, Anna Sótér
• Localización: Science, ISSN 0036-8075, Vol. 354, Nº 6312, 2016, págs. 611-614
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • Charge, parity, and time reversal (CPT) symmetry implies that a particle and its antiparticle have the same mass. The antiproton-to-electron mass ratio Embedded Image can be precisely determined from the single-photon transition frequencies of antiprotonic helium. We measured 13 such frequencies with laser spectroscopy to a fractional precision of 2.5 × 10−9 to 16 × 10−9. About 2 × 109 antiprotonic helium atoms were cooled to temperatures between 1.5 and 1.7 kelvin by using buffer-gas cooling in cryogenic low-pressure helium gas; the narrow thermal distribution led to the observation of sharp spectral lines of small thermal Doppler width. The deviation between the experimental frequencies and the results of three-body quantum electrodynamics calculations was reduced by a factor of 1.4 to 10 compared with previous single-photon experiments. From this, Embedded Image was determined as 1836.1526734(15), which agrees with a recent proton-to-electron experimental value within 8 × 10−10.