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Matter/Antimatter Symmetry and Antimatter Gravity Studied at once

Matter/Antimatter Symmetry and Antimatter Gravity Studied at once

© BASE Cooperation
BASE Penning trap system for comparison of proton and antiproton masses.

Research cooperation involving Leibniz University succeeds in the world's most accurate comparison of protons and antiprotons

In an article published in Nature, the BASE collaboration at CERN, Geneva, Switzerland, reports on the comparison of the antiproton-to-proton charge-to-mass ratio with eleven significant digits. This new measurement improves the precision of the previous best value by more than a factor of four, a considerable improvement in precision measurements. The data-set was accumulated over 1.5 years of measurement time, allowing for the first differential antiproton/proton test of the Einstein weak equivalence principle, which says that matter and antimatter behave the same under gravity.

Read the press release

 

Original publication:

M.J. Borchert et al., A 16-parts-per-trillion measurement of the antiproton-to-proton charge-mass ratio, Nature, 05.01.2022,
DOI: 10.1038/s41586-021-04203-w
www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-04203-w