Exploring Fundamental Symmetries, the Nuclear/Quantum frontier and beyond with Low-Energy Antimatter: The AEgIS Pathway

by Dr Ruggero Caravita (Trento Institute for Fundamental Physics and Applications, Povo, Trento (IT))

Thursday 18 Dec 2025, 16:30 → 17:30 Europe/Rome

P2A (Dipartimento di Fisica e Astronomia - Edificio Paolotti)

Low-energy antimatter has emerged, in the past 20 years, as a unique laboratory for testing fundamental symmetries, such as the Charge Parity Time symmetry, Local Lorentz Invariance and, more recently, the Weak Equivalence Principle—probing the gravitational interaction with free-falling antiatoms. On the other hand, interesting new opportunities are blossoming from the novel techniques developed by the low-energy antimatter community, fusing elements of ultracold atomic/quantum techniques with low-energy nuclear methods.

In this seminar, I wish to give an overview of contemporary low-energy antimatter (positron and antiproton) physics, by using as a testbench example the AEgIS experiment at CERN, to outline the new opportunities enabled by modern trapping, cooling, manipulation and detection techniques and the possibilities within reach at a typical low-energy antimatter experiment. Examples of such bridging techniques developed in recent years are the demonstration of laser cooling of positronium, opening towards a first Bose-Einstein condensation of antimatter; the development of two record-high-resolution detectors based on ultra-high resolution CMOS sensors and multiple TimePix4 units to study in-depth antiproton annihilation vertices and much more; a novel method to produce highly charged ions from antiproton annihilations in a Penning trap.

Looking forward, I will discuss a number of promising directions for the field. These include: trapping, positron-cooling and MR-TOF separating antiproton annihilation fragments, to realize pure short-lived radionuclide sources directly in a Penning trap enabling precision mass spectrometry; performing high-precision force measurements—gravity, magnetic moments, and charge-to-mass ratios—with neutral and charged atomic systems using moiré deflectometry in near-zero fields; enabling systematic, high-precision studies of antiproton annihilation on a wide variety of materials to probe fragment distributions and the strong-QED/low-energy-QCD interface; searching for a stable uuddss hexaquark state—a fully-SM Dark Matter candidate—in antiproton-³He annihilations.

Finally, I will outline two even longer-term perspectives: the prospect of producing low-energy antineutrons at the Antimatter Factory, opening the way to the first table-top antineutron experiments, and the possibility of trapping and cooling antideuterons in the AD to provide them to experiments, enabling a new class of annihilation studies and perspectives to form heavier anti-nuclei.