Ruggero Caravita appointed as new AEgIS spokeperson

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Mar 24, 2023/ Off Comments / in Announcement / by

The AEgIS experiment at CERN has appointed Ruggero Caravita, a physicist at the Trento Institute for Fundamental Physics and Applications of Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare, as its new spokesperson. Caravita focused on particle physics and non-linear optics during his studies at the University of Milano. He obtained his PhD from the University of Genova, where his thesis, conducted at CERN within the context of AEgIS, was focused on the experimental aspects of producing cold antiatoms in the laboratory. This was done in order to conduct the first gravitational studies with cold antimatter. He continued this line of research following the PhD, first through a CERN Senior Research fellowship and then a Marie-Curie Fellowship at INFN-TIFPA. Caravita has been involved with the AEgIS experiment for over 9 years, during which time he also served as Physics Coordinator before his recent election as spokesperson.

The AEgIS experiment is among a few experiments being conducted at CERN’s Antimatter Factory facility to investigate the properties of cold antimatter. These experiments could have significant implications for our understanding of the matter-antimatter asymmetry in the Universe, which remains one of the open fundamental questions in modern physics. The goal of AEgIS is to conduct the first-ever measurement of the gravitational free-fall of antimatter atoms. It uses a beam of cold antihydrogen atoms, which are the antimatter counterpart of hydrogen atoms, made of an antiproton and an antielectron, or positron. The experiment will measure their gravitational free-fall in Earth’s gravitational field to an unprecedented accuracy and thus test whether antimatter falls at the same rate as matter. This aims at verifying directly the validity for antiparticles of the Universality of the Free-Fall, one of the fundamental principles beyond Einstein’s theory of general relativity, postulating the perfect equivalence of the gravitational acceleration between bodies of the same mass and different internal composition. This groundbreaking research will help scientists gain a better understanding of the behavior of antimatter and could lead to new discoveries in fundamental physics. Caravita is excited to lead the AEgIS collaboration in this ambitious endeavor and is confident that the experiment will yield important results in the upcoming years.