Shaping the distribution of vertical velocities of antihydrogen in GBAR

Abstract

GBAR is a project aiming at measuring the free fall acceleration of gravity for antimatter, namely antihydrogen atoms ($\overline{\mathrm{H}}$). Precision of this timing experiment depends crucially on the dispersion of initial vertical velocities of the atoms as well as on the reliable control of their distribution. We propose to use a new method for shaping the distribution of vertical velocities of $\overline{\mathrm{H}}$, which improves these factors simultaneously. The method is based on quantum reflection of elastically and specularly bouncing $\overline{\mathrm{H}}$ with small initial vertical velocity on a bottom mirror disk, and absorption of atoms with large initial vertical velocities on a top rough disk. We estimate statistical and systematic uncertainties, and show that the accuracy for measuring the free fall acceleration $\overline{g}$ of $\overline{\mathrm{H}}$ could be pushed below $10^{-3}$ under realistic experimental conditions.

References in corpus (1)

• Gravitational quantum states of neutrons in a rough waveguide

Cited by in corpus (15)

• Quantum reflection of antihydrogen from a liquid helium film
• Analysis of the timing of freely falling antihydrogen
• Quantum interference test of the equivalence principle on antihydrogen
• Quantum ballistic experiment on antihydrogen fall
• Quantum delay in the time of arrival of free-falling atoms
• Time-of-arrival distributions for continuous quantum systems and application to quantum backflow
• Liouville transformations and quantum reflection
• Quantum interference measurement of the free fall of anti-hydrogen
• Tuning quantum reflection in graphene with an external magnetic field
• Resonance spectroscopy of gravitational states of antihydrogen
• Improved Effective Range Expansion for Casimir-Polder potential
• Improving the statistical analysis of anti-hydrogen free fall by using near edge events
• A spectroscopy approach to measure the gravitational mass of antihydrogen
• Quenching of antihydrogen gravitational states by surface charges
• Context-Dependent Time-Energy Uncertainty Relations from Projective Quantum Measurements