Design and characterisation of an antiproton deceleration beamline for the PUMA experiment

Abstract

We report on the design and characterization of an antiproton deceleration beamline, based on a pulsed drift tube, for the PUMA experiment at the Antimatter Factory at CERN. The design has been tailored to high-voltage (100 kV) and ultra-high vacuum (below $10^{-10}$ mbar) conditions. A first operation achieved decelerating antiprotons from an initial energy of 100 keV down to ($3898\pm 3$) eV, marking the initial stage in trapping antiprotons for the PUMA experiment. Employing a high-voltage ramping scheme, the pressure remains below $2\cdot 10^{-10}$ mbar upstream of the pulsed drift tube for 75% of the cycle time. The beamline reached a transmission of ($55\pm 3$)% for antiprotons decelerated to 4 keV. The beam is focused on a position sensitive detector to a spot with horizontal and vertical standard deviations of ${\sigma }_{\mathrm{horiz}}$ = ($3.0\pm 0.1$) mm and ${\sigma }_{\mathrm{vert}}$ = ($3.8\pm 0.2$) mm, respectively. This spot size is within the acceptance of the PUMA Penning trap.

References in corpus (6)

• Accurate Determination of the Neutron Skin Thickness of ${}^{208}$Pb through Parity-Violation in Electron Scattering
• Neutron skin of 208Pb, nuclear symmetry energy, and the parity radius experiment
• Neutron density distributions from antiprotonic 208Pb and 209Bi atoms
• Low-lying dipole strengths for probable $p$-wave one-neutron halos in the medium mass region
• Neutron-skin values and matter and neutron radii determined from reaction cross sections of proton scattering on ${}^{12}$C, ${}^{40,48}$Ca, ${}^{58}$Ni, ${}^{208}$Pb
• A multi-reflection time-of-flight mass spectrometer for the offline ion source of the PUMA experiment