Fundamental Symmetry Tests with Trapped Antihydrogen: ALPHA Project at CERN/AD

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ALPHA is an experiment based at CERN. The ALPHA collaboration involves scientists from 15 institutions in 8 countries. Over one-third of these scientists come from Canadian research laboratories and universities. The Canadian team has held major project funding from NSERC since its inception in 2005, and has made significant contributions to numerous ALPHA achievements. The goal of the ALPHA project is to measure and compare certain properties of 'antihydrogen' - the simplest atomic form of neutral antimatter - with those of ordinary hydrogen. In doing so, the collaboration will directly test and challenge fundamental theories about similarities and differences ('symmetries') between matter and antimatter, an issue that is arguably one of the greatest unsolved problems in physics. In recent years, ALPHA has achieved many significant and high profile milestones in its pursuit of its primary goal, including: novel application of cryogenic cooling techniques (2010), stable (2010) and long term (2011) trapping of neutral antimatter, and proof of principle microwave studies of trapped antihydrogen (2012). ALPHA is currently undergoing a major upgrade, to which the Canadian group has made significant contributions with support from NSERC. The new apparatus (ALPHA-2) will allow optical access to trapped antihydrogen for precision laser spectroscopy, as well as improved microwave spectroscopy. ALPHA-Canada's contributions to ALPHA-2 include: design and fabrication of the new anti-atom trap cryostat, upgrades to the detector readout system and data acquisition, new (and improved) trap electronics, as well as laser and microwave systems. In this proposal, we request funding to support an exciting and highly-visible three year program of research. It will result in the first-ever laser cooling of atomic antihydrogen, an improved measurement of the antihydrogen hyperfine splitting at a precision that is of fundamental physics interest, and a first demonstration of 1s-2s spectroscopy in antihydrogen.