Detection of low energy antiproton annihilations in a segmented silicon detector

The goal of the AEbar gIS experiment at the Antiproton Decelerator (AD) at CERN, is to measure directly the Earth's gravitational acceleration on antimatter by measuring the free fall of a pulsed, cold antihydrogen beam. The final position of the falling antihydrogen will be detected by a position sensitive detector. This detector will consist of an active silicon part, where the annihilations take place, followed by an emulsion part. Together, they allow to achieve 1% precision on the measurement of bar g with about 600 reconstructed and time tagged annihilations. We present here the prospects for the development of the AEbar gIS silicon position sentive detector and the results from the first beam tests on a monolithic silicon pixel sensor, along with a comparison to Monte Carlo simulations

Particle tracking at 4K: The Fast Annihilation Cryogenic Tracking (FACT) detector for the AEgIS antimatter gravity experiment

The AEgIS experiment is an international collaboration with the main goal of performing the first direct measurement of the Earth's gravitational acceleration on antimatter. Critical to the success of AEgIS is the production of cold antihydrogen (H) atoms. The FACT detector is used to measure the production and temperature of the H atoms and for establishing the formation of a H beam. The operating requirements for this detector are very challenging: it must be able to identify each of the thousand or so annihilations in the 1 ms period of pulsed H production, operate at 4 K inside a 1 T solenoidal field and not produce more than 10 W of heat. The FACT detector consists of two concentric cylindrical layers of 400 scintillator fibres with a 1 mm diameter and a 0.6 mm pitch. The scintillating fibres are coupled to clear fibres which transport the scintillation light to 800 silicon photomultipliers. Each silicon photomultiplier signal is connected to a linear amplifier and a fast discriminator, the outputs of which are sampled continuously by Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs). In the course of the developments for the FACT detector we have established the performance of scintillating fibres at 4 K by means of a cosmic-ray tracker operating in a liquid helium cryostat. The FACT detector was installed in the AEgIS apparatus in December 2012 and will be used to study the H formation when the low energy antiproton physics programs resume at CERN in the Summer of 2014. This paper presents the design requirements and construction methods of the FACT detector and provides the first results of the detector commissioning