Abstract
The AEgIS experiment is an interdisciplinary collaboration between atomic, plasma and particle physicists, with the scientific goal of performing the first precision measurement of the Earth's gravitational acceleration on antimatter. The principle of the experiment is as follows: cold antihydrogen atoms are synthesized in a Penning-Malmberg trap and are Stark accelerated towards a moiré deflectometer, the classical counterpart of an atom interferometer, and annihilate on a position sensitive detector. Crucial to the success of the experiment is an antihydrogen detector that will be used to demonstrate the production of antihydrogen and also to measure the temperature of the anti-atoms and the creation of a beam. The operating requirements for the detector are very challenging: it must operate at close to 4 K inside a 1 T solenoid magnetic field and identify the annihilation of the antihydrogen atoms that are produced during the 1 μs period of antihydrogen production. Our solution—called the FACT detector—is based on a novel multi-layer scintillating fiber tracker with SiPM readout and off the shelf FPGA based readout system. This talk will present the design of the FACT detector and detail the operation of the detector in the context of the AEgIS experiment.
Highlights
Detection of antihydrogen production is a crucial requirement for the AEgIS experiment
The principle of the experiment is as follows: cold antihydrogen atoms are synthesized in a Penning-Malmberg trap and are Stark accelerated towards a moiredeflectometer, the classical counterpart of an atom interferometer, and annihilate on a position sensitive detector
The operating requirements for the detector are very challenging: it must operate at close to 4 K inside a 1 T solenoid magnetic field and identify the annihilation of the antihydrogen atoms that are produced during the 1 μs period of antihydrogen production
Summary
Detection of antihydrogen production is a crucial requirement for the AEgIS experiment. The first direct detection of antihydrogen production was performed by the ATHENA collaboration who used the annihilation of the antiproton and positron to identify antihydrogen production [7]. The ATHENA antihydrogen detector consisted of a two layer silicon strip tracking detector and CsI crystals, which surrounded the Penning-Malmberg traps in which the antihydrogen was produced. The pions tracks were reconstructed with the silicon strip detector and extrapolated back to identify the antiproton annihilation vertex, while the CsI crystals were used to identify the 511 keV photons. Unlike the ATHENA detector, the ALPHA antihydrogen detector only identifies the location and time of the constituent antiproton annihilation and used the spatial distribution of these vertices to distinguish between antihydrogen and bare antiproton annihilations [8]
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