TEMPERATURE SIMULATION AND CALCULATION FOR THE ANTIMATTER EXPERIMENT: GRAVITY, INTERFEROMETRY, AND SPECTROSCOPY
Open Access
- Author:
- Brown, Stephanie Meghan
- Millennium Scholars Program:
- Astronomy and Astrophysics (ASTRO)
- Degree:
- Bachelor of Science
- Document Type:
- Thesis
- Thesis Supervisor:
- Miguel Alejandro Mostafa, Thesis Supervisor
Christopher Palma, Honors Advisor - Keywords:
- antimatter
gravity
CERN
AEgIS
antihydrogen - Abstract:
- An important aspect of an antimatter plasma is the temperature, and it is critical to the success of the AEg ̄IS experiment that we are able to accurately determine the temperature of our plasma and hence the effectiveness of our cooling systems. The goal of the AEg ̄IS experiment is to mea- sure the acceleration due to gravity on antihydrogen atoms. The atoms will be allowed to free fall. The slower the particles tangential velocity, the larger the vertical deflection will be. Since our detectors have a finite spacial resolution, we must require that the temperature of the particles is below a threshold (∼ μK). This thesis discusses a simulation that mimics the measurement. The temperature is calculated using the Maxwell-Boltzmann equation to relate kinetic energy to tem- perature. A potential well contains the particles. The potential well is slowly lowered so that small numbers of particles escape at a time. Since we know particle number as a function of energy, we can determine the temperature of the ensemble. We treat the particles classically and neglect quantum effects. We only extract the first 1% of the particles in the simulation as, in the actual experiment, we want to remove only the high energy tail of the particles. Doing this will minimize the effects of space charge and evaporative cooling. We use this simulation to examine the effects of different parameters such as temperature, particle number, and ramping speed on the measure- ment. In addition, we will examine the fit used to retrieve the temperature and the error inherent in the calculation, which contains some approximations.