Overview
- A peer‑reviewed Nature Communications paper reports Be+‑assisted sympathetic cooling that yielded more than 15,000 antihydrogen atoms in under seven hours.
- CERN describes an eightfold increase in production rate, while Phys.org reports roughly a tenfold gain in trapping rate based on the same advance.
- The method uses laser‑cooled beryllium ions to chill positrons inside a Penning trap to below about 10 K, greatly boosting formation efficiency.
- Applying this approach during the 2023–24 runs, ALPHA produced over 2 million antihydrogen atoms, vastly expanding available samples.
- The larger, faster supplies are being used to speed spectroscopy campaigns and to support gravity studies in the ALPHA‑g experiment.