Magnetic trapping of ultracold neutrons

Three-dimensional magnetic confinement of neutrons is reported. Neutrons are loaded into an Ioffe-type superconducting magnetic trap through inelastic scattering of cold neutrons with 4He. Scattered neutrons with sufficiently low energy and in the appropriate spin state are confined by the magnetic field until they decay. The electron resulting from neutron decay produces scintillations in the liquid helium bath that results in a pulse of extreme ultraviolet light. This light is frequency downconverted to the visible and detected. Results are presented in which 500 +/- 155 neutrons are magnetically trapped in each loading cycle, consistent with theoretical predictions. The lifetime of the observed signal, 660 s +290/-170 s, is consistent with the neutron beta-decay lifetime.Comment: 17 pages, 18 figures, accepted for publication in Physical Review

ECH AND ECE APPLICATION FOR SPECTRAL ANALYSIS OF THE GLOBAL PLASMA OSCILLATIONS AT TOKAMAK. EXPERIMENTS ON T-10

The spectral characteristics of the large scale (MHD) plasma oscillations were investigated. ECH was used for a modification of plasma parameters. Main tool of the analysis was the high space resolution ECE method. The selection of different modes of oscillations was fulfilled. The simple relations between the eigen-frequencies of oscillations and the radii of the corresponding rational magnetic surfaces were discovered. The absolute values of all measured eigen-frequencies coincide well with the calculation by the introduced formula

ECH AND ECE APPLICATION FOR SPECTRAL ANALYSIS OF THE GLOBAL PLASMA OSCILLATIONS AT TOKAMAK. EXPERIMENTS ON T-10

The spectral characteristics of the large scale (MHD) plasma oscillations were investigated. ECH was used for a modification of plasma parameters. Main tool of the analysis was the high space resolution ECE method. The selection of different modes of oscillations was fulfilled. The simple relations between the eigen-frequencies of oscillations and the radii of the corresponding rational magnetic surfaces were discovered. The absolute values of all measured eigen-frequencies coincide well with the calculation by the introduced formula

Advances in antihydrogen physics

The creation of cold antihydrogen atoms by the controlled combination of positrons and antiprotons has opened up a new window on fundamental physics. More recently, techniques have been developed that allow some antihydrogen atoms to be created at low enough kinetic energies that they can be held inside magnetic minimum neutral atom traps. With confinement times of many minutes possible, it has become feasible to perform experiments to probe the properties of the antiatom for the first time. We review the experimental progress in this area, outline some of the motivation for studying basic aspects of antimatter physics and provide an outlook of where we might expect this field to go in the coming years