Regular Article

Toward inertial sensing with a 2³S positronium beam

¹ Department of Physics, University of Trento, via Sommarive 14, 38123 Povo, Trento, Italy
² TIFPA/INFN Trento, via Sommarive 14, 38123 Povo, Trento, Italy
³ Physics Department, CERN, 1211 Geneva, Switzerland
⁴ INFN Padova, via Marzolo 8, 35131 Padova, Italy

^a e-mail: mariazzi@science.unitn.it

Received: 20 November 2019
Received in final form: 13 February 2020
Published online: 22 April 2020

Abstract

In this work, we discuss the possibility of inertial sensing with positronium in the 2³S metastable state for the measurement of optical dipole, relativistic and gravitational forces on a purely leptonic matter-antimatter system. Starting from the characteristics of an available 2³S beam, we estimate the time necessary to measure accelerations ranging from ~10⁵ m/s² to 9.1 m/s² with two different inertial sensitive devices: a classical moiré deflectometer and a Mach–Zehnder interferometer. The sensitivity of the Mach–Zehnder interferometer has been estimated to be several tens of times better than that of the moiré deflectometer, for the same measurement time. Different strategies to strengthen the 2³S beam flux and to improve the sensitivity of the devices are proposed and analyzed. Among them, the most promising are reducing the divergence of the positronium beam through 2D laser Doppler cooling and coherent positronium Raman excitation from the ground state to the 2³S level. If implemented, these improvements promise to result in the time required to measure an acceleration of 9.1 m/s² of few weeks and 100 m/s² of a few hours. Different detection schemes for resolving the fringe pattern shift generated on 2³S positronium crossing the deflectometer/interferometer are also discussed.