Production and study of antideuterium with the GBAR beamline

Philipp Blumer; Ben Ohayon; Paolo Crivelli

doi:10.1140/epjd/s10053-025-00963-6

2023 Impact factor 1.5

Atomic, Molecular, Optical and Plasma Physics

Precision Physics of Simple Atomic Systems – 2024

Open Access

Eur. Phys. J. D (2025) 79: 17
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjd/s10053-025-00963-6

Regular Article

Production and study of antideuterium with the GBAR beamline

Philipp Blumer¹^a, Ben Ohayon² and Paolo Crivelli¹

¹ Institute for Particle Physics and Astrophysics, ETH Zurich, 8093, Zurich, Switzerland
² Physics Department, Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, 3200003, Haifa, Israel

^a philipp.blumer@cern.ch

Received: 23 October 2024
Accepted: 21 January 2025
Published online: 3 March 2025

Abstract

The potential of circulating antideuterons ( $\bar{d}$ $\mathrm {\overline{d}}$ ) in the AD/ELENA facility at CERN is under active investigation. Approximately 100 $\bar{d}$ $\mathrm {\overline{d}}$ per bunch could be delivered as a $100 keV$ ${100\,\textrm{keV}}$ beam based on measured cross-sections. These $\bar{d}$ $\mathrm {\overline{d}}$ could be further decelerated to $12 keV$ ${12\,\textrm{keV}}$ using the GBAR scheme, enabling the synthesis of antideuterium ( $\bar{D}$ $\mathrm {\overline{D}}$ ) via charge exchange with positronium, a technique successfully demonstrated with $6 keV$ ${6\,\textrm{keV}}$ antiprotons for antihydrogen production. The AD/ELENA facility is currently studying the possibility of increasing the $\bar{d}$ $\mathrm {\overline{d}}$ rate using an optimized new target geometry. Assuming this is feasible, we propose further enhancing the anti-atom production by using laser-excited positronium in the 2P state within a cavity, which is expected to increase the $\bar{D} (2 S)$ $\mathrm {\overline{D}}(2S)$ production cross-section by almost an order of magnitude for $\bar{d}$ $\mathrm {\overline{d}}$ with $2 keV$ ${2\,\textrm{keV}}$ energy. We present the projected precision for measuring the antideuterium Lamb shift and extracting the antideuteron charge radius, as a function of the beam flux.

Guest editors: Paolo Crivelli, Daniel Kienzler, Fabian Schmid, Savely Karshenboim, Vladimir Shabaev.

© The Author(s) 2025

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