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Life of Experiment

History and main events

9/12/2004: The scientific comittee of Dapnia (Irfu) /SPP approves an R&D programme on methods leading to the production of antihydrogen using positronium.

15/04/2005: French Patent N° 2 852 480

11/2005: demonstration of the extraction of more than 1010 electrons from a Penning trap in less than 75 ns. This test was performed at the Atomic Physics Laboratory of RIKEN (Wako, Japan).

03/2008: SOPHI hardware arrived at the lab.
05/2008: A nanoporous SiO2 material converts 35% of incoming 2 keV e+ into o-Ps (with ETHZ, Orléans (CEMHTI), and Tsukuba-AIST).

07/2008: SELMA arrived at the lab,
12/2008: first runs at low intensity.
06/2009: runs at 0.14 mA.
12/2009: first observations of fast e+ signal.
2010: Measurement of o-Ps energy emitted into vacuum at 45 meV kinetic energy using a time of flight method, and at UC Riverside using a laser.
2010: Tests to accumulate positrons in the RIKEN MRT Penning trap. The e+ beam is produced from a 22Na radioactive source moderated with solid Neon.
11/2010: GBAR collaboration formed.
01/2011: RIKEN trap transported to Saclay.
06/2011: Slow e+ beam.
08/2011: 3.2 106 slow e+ s-1 obtained using 12 stacked tungsten meshes.
09/2011: GBAR proposal submitted to CERN SPSC scientific committee.
01/2012: GBAR proposal recommended for approval by CERN SPSC.

Perspectives

Connection between slow positron beam line and RIKEN trap (March 2012)

Accumulation of positrons (2012)

Creation of target positronium downstream of trap (2013)

Excitation of Ps target with lasers (2014)