English

Antimatter gravity with muonium

Instrumentation and Detectors 2016-03-21 v2 General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology High Energy Physics - Experiment

Abstract

The gravitational acceleration of antimatter, gˉ\bar{g}, has never been directly measured and could bear importantly on our understanding of gravity, the possible existence of a fifth force, and the nature and early history of the universe. Three avenues appear feasible for such a measurement: antihydrogen, positronium, and muonium. The muonium measurement requires a novel monoenergetic, low-velocity, horizontal muonium beam directed at an atom interferometer. The precision three-grating interferometer can be produced in silicon nitride or ultrananocrystalline diamond using state-of-the-art nanofabrication. The required precision alignment and calibration at the picometer level also appear to be feasible. With 100 nm grating pitch, a 10% measurement of gˉ\bar{g} can be made using some months of surface-muon beam time, and a 1% or better measurement with a correspondingly larger exposure. This could constitute the first gravitational measurement of leptonic matter, of 2nd-generation matter and, possibly, the first measurement of the gravitational acceleration of antimatter.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1601.07222,
  title  = {Antimatter gravity with muonium},
  author = {Daniel M Kaplan and Ephraim Fischbach and Klaus Kirch and Derrick C Mancini and James D Phillips and Thomas J Phillips and Robert D Reasenberg and Thomas J Roberts and Jeff Terry},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1601.07222},
  year   = {2016}
}

Comments

8 pages, 2 figures. Presented at the Third Workshop on Antimatter Gravity (WAG2015), London, England, 4-7 August 2015

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