The buffer-gas trap (BGT) is a device used to accumulate positrons (the antiparticles of electrons) efficiently while minimizing positron loss due to annihilation, which occurs when an electron and positron collide and the energy is converted to gamma rays. The BGT is used for a variety of research applications, particularly those that benefit from specially tailored positron gases, plasmas and/or pulsed beams. Examples include use of the BGT to create antihydrogen and the positronium molecule.
The schematic design of a BGT is illustrated in Fig. 1. [1] [2] It consists of a specially designed (Penning or Penning–Malmberg) type electromagnetic trap. [2] Positrons are confined in a vacuum inside an electrode structure consisting of a stack of hollow, cylindrical metal electrodes such as that shown in Fig. 2. A uniform axial magnetic field inhibits positron motion radially, and voltages imposed on end electrodes prevent axial loss. Such traps are renowned for their good confinement properties for particles (such as positrons) of a single sign of charge. [3]
Given a trap designed for good confinement, a remaining challenge is to efficiently fill the device. In the BGT, this is accomplished using a series of inelastic collisions with a molecular gas. In a positron-molecule collision, annihilation is much less probable than energy loss due to electronic or vibrational excitation. The BGT has a stepped potential well (Fig. 1) with regions at successively lower gas pressure. Electronic excitation of molecular nitrogen (N2) in the highest-pressure region is used to trap the positrons. This process is repeated until the particles are in a sufficiently low-pressure environment and the annihilation time is acceptably long. The particles cool to the ambient gas temperature due to inelastic vibrational and rotational collisions.
Trap efficiency is typically 5 – 30%, but can be as much as 40%. [4] Positronium (Ps) formation via charge-exchange (e.g., e++ N2-> N2++ Ps) is a major loss process. Molecular nitrogen is used because it is unique in having an electronic energy level below the threshold for Ps formation; hence it is the trapping gas of choice. [5] Similarly, carbon tetrafluoride (CF4) and sulfur hexafluoride (SF6) have very large vibrational excitation cross sections, and so these gases are used for cooling to the ambient temperature (typically ~ 300 K). [6]
While most positron sources produce positrons with energies ranging from a few kiloelectronvolts (keV) to more than 500 keV, the BGT is only useful for much lower energy particles (i.e. less than or equal to tens of electronvolts). [4] Thus, high-energy positrons from such sources are injected into the surfaces of materials (so-called positron moderators) in which they lose energy, diffuse to the surface, and are re-emitted with electronvolt energies. [4] The moderator of choice for the BGT is solid neon (~ 1% conversion efficiency [7] ), frozen on a cold metal surface.
The lifetime in the final trapping stage is limited by annihilation and is typically less than or equal to 100 seconds, which limits the total number of trapped positrons. If larger particle numbers are desired, the positrons are transferred to an ultra-high vacuum (UHV) Penning–Malmberg trap in a several Tesla magnetic field. Annihilation is negligible in UHV. Positron cooling (necessary to combat heating due to extrinsic effects) is now due to the emission of cyclotron radiation in the large magnetic field. [4] This accumulation and transfer process can then be repeated to build up larger collections of antimatter.
The BGT was invented in the 1980s, originally intended to study positron transport in tokamak (fusion) plasmas. [8] Subsequently, the technique was refined and is now used in laboratories worldwide for a variety of applications. They include study of positron interactions with atoms and molecules, materials, and material surfaces; [9] [10] [11] [12] the creation of antihydrogen, [13] [14] [15] [16] the positronium molecule (i.e., Ps2, e+e−e+e−), [17] and novel positron [18] and positronium beams. [19] BGTs are also expected to play similarly important roles in efforts to create and study positronium atom Bose–Einstein condensates (BEC) [20] and a classical electron-positron "pair" plasmas. [4] [21] [22]
In modern physics, antimatter is defined as matter composed of the antiparticles of the corresponding particles in "ordinary" matter, and can be thought of as matter with reversed charge, parity, and time, known as CPT reversal. Antimatter occurs in natural processes like cosmic ray collisions and some types of radioactive decay, but only a tiny fraction of these have successfully been bound together in experiments to form antiatoms. Minuscule numbers of antiparticles can be generated at particle accelerators; however, total artificial production has been only a few nanograms. No macroscopic amount of antimatter has ever been assembled due to the extreme cost and difficulty of production and handling. Nonetheless, antimatter is an essential component of widely available applications related to beta decay, such as positron emission tomography, radiation therapy, and industrial imaging.
The positron or antielectron is the particle with an electric charge of +1e, a spin of 1/2, and the same mass as an electron. It is the antiparticle of the electron. When a positron collides with an electron, annihilation occurs. If this collision occurs at low energies, it results in the production of two or more photons.
Positronium (Ps) is a system consisting of an electron and its anti-particle, a positron, bound together into an exotic atom, specifically an onium. Unlike hydrogen, the system has no protons. The system is unstable: the two particles annihilate each other to predominantly produce two or three gamma-rays, depending on the relative spin states. The energy levels of the two particles are similar to that of the hydrogen atom. However, because of the reduced mass, the frequencies of the spectral lines are less than half of those for the corresponding hydrogen lines.
Antihydrogen is the antimatter counterpart of hydrogen. Whereas the common hydrogen atom is composed of an electron and proton, the antihydrogen atom is made up of a positron and antiproton. Scientists hope that studying antihydrogen may shed light on the question of why there is more matter than antimatter in the observable universe, known as the baryon asymmetry problem. Antihydrogen is produced artificially in particle accelerators.
ATHENA, also known as the AD-1 experiment, was an antimatter research project at the Antiproton Decelerator at CERN, Geneva. In August 2002, it was the first experiment to produce 50,000 low-energy antihydrogen atoms, as reported in Nature. In 2005, ATHENA was disbanded and many of the former members of the research team worked on the subsequent ALPHA experiment and AEgIS experiment.
The Antihydrogen Trap (ATRAP) collaboration at the Antiproton Decelerator facility at CERN, Geneva, is responsible for the AD-2 experiment. It is a continuation of the TRAP collaboration, which started taking data for the TRAP experiment in 1985. The TRAP experiment pioneered cold antiprotons, cold positrons, and first made the ingredients of cold antihydrogen to interact. Later ATRAP members pioneered accurate hydrogen spectroscopy and observed the first hot antihydrogen atoms.
Jayme Tiomno was a Brazilian experimental and theoretical physicist with interests in particle physics and general relativity. He was member of the Brazilian Academy of Sciences and a recipient of the Brazilian Order of Scientific Merit. He was the son of Jewish Russian immigrants.
The gravitational interaction of antimatter with matter or antimatter has been observed by physicists. As was the consensus among physicists previously, it was experimentally confirmed that gravity attracts both matter and antimatter at the same rate within experimental error.
Gerald Gabrielse is an American physicist. He is the Board of Trustees Professor of Physics and director of the Center for Fundamental Physics at Northwestern University, and Emeritus George Vasmer Leverett Professor of Physics at Harvard University. He is primarily known for his experiments trapping and investigating antimatter, measuring the electron g-factor, and measuring the electron electric dipole moment. He has been described as "a leader in super-precise measurements of fundamental particles and the study of anti-matter."
Positronium hydride, or hydrogen positride is an exotic molecule consisting of a hydrogen atom bound to an exotic atom of positronium. Its formula is PsH. It was predicted to exist in 1951 by A Ore, and subsequently studied theoretically, but was not observed until 1990. R. Pareja, R. Gonzalez from Madrid trapped positronium in hydrogen laden magnesia crystals. The trap was prepared by Yok Chen from the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. In this experiment the positrons were thermalized so that they were not traveling at high speed, and they then reacted with H− ions in the crystal. In 1992 it was created in an experiment done by David M. Schrader and F.M. Jacobsen and others at the Aarhus University in Denmark. The researchers made the positronium hydride molecules by firing intense bursts of positrons into methane, which has the highest density of hydrogen atoms. Upon slowing down, the positrons were captured by ordinary electrons to form positronium atoms which then reacted with hydrogen atoms from the methane.
Positron annihilation spectroscopy (PAS) or sometimes specifically referred to as positron annihilation lifetime spectroscopy (PALS) is a non-destructive spectroscopy technique to study voids and defects in solids.
The Antiproton Decelerator (AD) is a storage ring at the CERN laboratory near Geneva. It was built from the Antiproton Collector (AC) to be a successor to the Low Energy Antiproton Ring (LEAR) and started operation in the year 2000. Antiprotons are created by impinging a proton beam from the Proton Synchrotron on a metal target. The AD decelerates the resultant antiprotons to an energy of 5.3 MeV, which are then ejected to one of several connected experiments.
In physics a non-neutral plasma is a plasma whose net charge creates an electric field large enough to play an important or even dominant role in the plasma dynamics. The simplest non-neutral plasmas are plasmas consisting of a single charge species. Examples of single species non-neutral plasmas that have been created in laboratory experiments are plasmas consisting entirely of electrons, pure ion plasmas, positron plasmas, and antiproton plasmas.
Lowell S. Brown was an American theoretical physicist who was a Staff Scientist and Laboratory Fellow at Los Alamos National Laboratory, and Professor Emeritus of physics at University of Washington. He was a student of Julian Schwinger at Harvard University and a recipient of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship. Brown authored a book on Quantum Field Theory that has received over 5,000 citations, and authored or co-authored over 150 articles that have accumulated over 11,000 citations. Brown died on April 5, 2023, at the age of 89.
The Antihydrogen Laser Physics Apparatus (ALPHA), also known as AD-5, is an experiment at CERN's Antiproton Decelerator, designed to trap antihydrogen in a magnetic trap in order to study its atomic spectra. The ultimate goal of the experiment is to test CPT symmetry through comparing the respective spectra of hydrogen and antihydrogen. Scientists taking part in ALPHA include former members of the ATHENA experiment (AD-1), the first to produce cold antihydrogen in 2002.
AEgIS, AD-6, is an experiment at the Antiproton Decelerator facility at CERN. Its primary goal is to measure directly the effect of Earth's gravitational field on antihydrogen atoms with significant precision. Indirect bounds that assume the validity of, for example, the universality of free fall, the Weak Equivalence Principle or CPT symmetry also in the case of antimatter constrain an anomalous gravitational behavior to a level where only precision measurements can provide answers. Vice versa, antimatter experiments with sufficient precision are essential to validate these fundamental assumptions. AEgIS was originally proposed in 2007. Construction of the main apparatus was completed in 2012. Since 2014, two laser systems with tunable wavelengths and synchronized to the nanosecond for specific atomic excitation have been successfully commissioned.
The rotating wall technique is a method used to compress a single-component plasma confined in an electromagnetic trap. It is one of many scientific and technological applications that rely on storing charged particles in vacuum. This technique has found extensive use in improving the quality of these traps and in tailoring of both positron and antiproton plasmas for a variety of end uses.
John Holmes Malmberg was an American plasma physicist and a professor at the University of California, San Diego. He was known for making the first experimental measurements of Landau damping of plasma waves in 1964, as well as for his research on non-neutral plasmas and the development of the Penning–Malmberg trap.
Clifford Michael Surko is an American physicist, whose works involve plasma physics, atomic physics, nonlinear dynamics and solid state physics. Together with his colleagues, he developed techniques for laser scattering at small angles to study waves and turbulence in tokamak plasmas and invented a positron trap that was used in experiments worldwide to study antimatter. Surko also developed other techniques for studying positron plasmas and examined atomic and plasma physics with positrons.
The Penning–Malmberg trap, named after Frans Penning and John Malmberg, is an electromagnetic device used to confine large numbers of charged particles of a single sign of charge. Much interest in Penning–Malmberg (PM) traps arises from the fact that if the density of particles is large and the temperature is low, the gas will become a single-component plasma. While confinement of electrically neutral plasmas is generally difficult, single-species plasmas can be confined for long times in PM traps. They are the method of choice to study a variety of plasma phenomena. They are also widely used to confine antiparticles such as positrons and antiprotons for use in studies of the properties of antimatter and interactions of antiparticles with matter.