Muonium Beam Brings a New Antimatter Gravity Test Closer
PhysicsUnverifiedUpdated:
A team reportedly built and tested a muonium beam with more uniform speed and direction. It is a step toward testing the gravity response of this antimatter-containing system, while the gravity measurement itself remains future work.
A narrow beam traveling at about 2.2 km per second
A published report describes a beam of muonium—an electrically neutral, short-lived pairing of an antimuon and an electron—made by directing antimuons into superfluid helium. The reported setup produced a narrow beam traveling at about 2.2 kilometers per second; detectors reconstructed the particles' paths after they decayed. The beam currently travels upward, and the team still needs to redirect it horizontally and add an interferometer before attempting a gravity measurement.
Existing muonium sources produced diffuse thermal beams, spreading particles across a broad range of directions and speeds.
Researchers reportedly built and tested a more orderly muonium beam, a step intended to support a future measurement of how this antimatter-containing system responds to gravity.
Muonium's mass is almost entirely associated with its antimatter component, and its antimuon is an elementary second-generation particle. A gravity measurement using it would test the weak equivalence principle in a regime not reached by prior antihydrogen experiments. The report says the eventual measurement could reach about 1 percent precision.
Sources
- ScienceAlertPhysicists Build a 'Mad-Scientist' Antimatter Beam to Test Einstein's Theory of General RelativityRead source →