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A new application of emulsions to measure the gravitational force on antihydrogen

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Published 21 February 2013 Published under licence by IOP Publishing Ltd
, , Citation C Amsler et al 2013 JINST 8 P02015 DOI 10.1088/1748-0221/8/02/P02015

1748-0221/8/02/P02015

Abstract

We propose to build and operate a detector based on the emulsion film technology for the measurement of the gravitational acceleration on antimatter, to be performed by the AEgIS experiment (AD6) at CERN. The goal of AEgIS is to test the weak equivalence principle with a precision of 1% on the gravitational acceleration g by measuring the vertical position of the annihilation vertex of antihydrogen atoms after their free fall while moving horizontally in a vacuum pipe. With the emulsion technology developed at the University of Bern we propose to improve the performance of AEgIS by exploiting the superior position resolution of emulsion films over other particle detectors. The idea is to use a new type of emulsion films, especially developed for applications in vacuum, to yield a spatial resolution of the order of one micron in the measurement of the sag of the antihydrogen atoms in the gravitational field. This is an order of magnitude better than what was planned in the original AEgIS proposal.

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10.1088/1748-0221/8/02/P02015