One of the highlights in the annual Physics calendar is the announcement of the “Physics Breakthroughs of the Year”, by the journal Physics World. This year, our paper on "Sympathetic cooling of protons mediated by a superconducting LC-circuit", published in Nature, was selected as one of the top ten achievements made in 2021.
We congratulate our friends at PENTATRAP at the Max Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics in Heidelberg, which report here on the detection of a 200eV excited metastable state in highly charged Rhenium, identified by a 10 ppt mass measurement. Also some BASE members were involved in the study.
Today we publish the first limits on the interaction of antiprotons with axion-like dark matter. For this work we’ve teamed up with scientists from the PRISMA+ cluster at Mainz, which have great expertise in dark matter research
Today we published a new paper in Physical Review Applied, on an innovative, tunable magnetic shielding system. With the tuned system, we suppress external magnetic field disturbances by up to a factor of 225 ± 15. Together with other developments, this will enable future antiproton-to-proton charge-to-mass ratio comparisons with fourfold reduced frequency fluctuations and antiproton magnetic moment determinations with about tenfold reduced uncertainty.
The IUPAP Prize for Atomic, Molecular, and Optical Physics 2019 was awarded to the BASE members Christian Smorra (RIKEN and CERN) and Andreas Mooser (RIKEN and MPIK). The highly competitive research prize was awarded…
“…for outstanding contributions to determine the most precise comparison of the proton-to-antiproton charge-to-mass ratios and the most precise comparison of the proton and antiproton magnetic moments, constituting two different world-record tests of the fundamental charge, parity, and time reversal symmetry in these systems.”
Today we’ve celebrated the inauguration of the Max-Planck/PTB/RIKEN Center for Time, Constants and Fundamental Symmetries, the event took place at RIKEN’s Wako-Campus in Japan. We’ve organized a symposium with invited speakers Marianna Safronova (Univ. Delaware) and Yoshiro Takahashi (Kyoto University), and center speakers Klaus Blaum (MPG), Ekkehard Peik (PTB), and Stefan Ulmer (RIKEN). Guests like Prof. M. Stratmann (President MPG), Prof. J. Ullrich (President PTB), Prof. S. Koyasu and Prof. M. Kotani (RIKEN Executive Directors), and Dr. H. von Werthern, the ambassador of Germany in Japan, joined the event.
We are happy to announce that the future research of our team members Elise Wursten and Jack Devlin will be supported by two individual, highly competitive CERN research fellowships. We greatfully acknowledge the invaluable support by CERN. Elise Wursten joined the BASE team in July 2018, she was previously working on measurements of the electric dipole moment of the neutron.
Today we report on the first explicit measurement of cyclotron quantum heating rates in a cryogenic Penning trap. We demonstrate that the scaled electric field noise in our spin-analysis trap, an essential instrument in our 1.5 p.p.b. measurement of the antiproton magnetic moment, is much lower than observed in other ion trap experiments. It corresponds to a heating rate below 0.1 quanta per hour and a radial energy stability on the peV/s-level.
Today we report in SCIENCE on a new measurement of the proton magnetic moment in units of the nuclear magneton. The updated value gp/2=2.792 847 344 62 (82) is consistent with our previous best measurement, but improves the precision by a factor of 11. The measurement was carried out using an optimized double Penning trap technique. Compared to our 2014 measurement, a trap with higher magnetic field stability and homogeneity was implemented.
Today we report in Nature on an improved measurement of the magnetic moment of the antiproton. The new measurement outperforms our old record measurement by a factor of 350 in experimental precision.