PSICO - Positronium Inertial and Correlation Observations


PSICO (Positronium Inertial and Correlation Observations) is part of  the Low Energy Antimatter (LEA) project, which gathers the INFN-funded experiments that produce and manipulate antimatter at low energies for fundamental and applied studies. These experiments are mainly focused on the study of fundamental symmetries both on the hadronic and leptonic sectors of the Standard Model (SM).

Researchers at TIFPA are active in two experiments whithin LEA: PSICO and AEgIS (Antimatter Experiment: gravity, Interferometry, Spectroscopy) . The AEgIS experiment is carried out at the AD (Antiproton Decelerator) Hall at CERN by an international collaboration, and its purpose is to measure the gravitational acceleration experienced by antimatter in Earth’s gravitational field. AD is the only machine in the world that can deliver slow antiprotons for such studies on cold antiatoms.

PSICO is carried out at the AML (AntiMatter Laboratory) at the Department of Physics of the Trento University and it is based on manipulation positronium atoms by laser light to study its fundamental properties.

The Science

The PsICO experiment aims to perform studies of inertial sensing on Ps, including gravity, and the entanglement of the three gammas coming from the annihilation of Ps prepared in selected quantum states. These two activities are based on the pulsed production of a beam of Ps in long lived states and its manipulation. The intense bunched positron beam for the production of Ps is in advanced state of construction at the Antimatter Laboratory (AML) at Trento. Inertial sensing studies on metastable Ps will be performed employing both defectometry and interferometry techniques.

TEAM

• Involved external institutions: CERN,  University of Bergen (Norway), Jagiellonian University - Kracow (Poland), University of Torun (Poland), Department of Physics-University of Trento, Dipartimento di Fisica-Università di Milano
• INFN groups: TIFPA, Milano
• Principal Investigator: 
• INFN Project: CSN III
• Duration:

TIFPA Team

• Local responsible for TIFPA: Sebastiano Mariazzi
• Involved TIFPA people: Ruggero Caravita, Roberto S. Brusa, Luca Penasa, Marco Bettonte, Luca Povolo.
 

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