Document Type
Article
Publication Date
11-2025
Publisher
Nature Publishing
Source Publication
Nature Communications
Source ISSN
2041-1723
Abstract
Antihydrogen, the bound state of a positron and an antiproton, is the only pure anti-atomic system ever studied. It is produced exclusively in the laboratory, as it has never been observed in nature. This unique system is of great interest for searching for tentative differences between matter and antimatter. Antihydrogen has been routinely trapped since 2010 and accumulated since 2017, enabling, for example, the first precision spectroscopic study of the anti-atom in 2018 and the first observation of the influence of gravity in 2023. Here we report an eight-fold increase in the trapping rate of antihydrogen, enabled by sympathetic cooling of positrons with laser-cooled beryllium ions. With beryllium sympathetic cooling, we now accumulate over 15000 antihydrogen atoms in under seven hours. This technique transforms our ability to study systematic and sidereal effects in existing experiments while paving the way for studies that would otherwise remain out of reach.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Recommended Citation
Tharp, Tim, "Be + Assisted, Simultaneous Confinement of More Than 15000 Antihydrogen Atoms" (2025). Physics Faculty Research and Publications. 187.
https://epublications.marquette.edu/physics_fac/187
Comments
Published version. Nature Communications (2025). DOI. This article is © The Authors.
This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made.
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