Annihilation of low energy antiprotons in silicon


Abstract in English

The goal of the AE$mathrm{bar{g}}$IS experiment at the Antiproton Decelerator (AD) at CERN, is to measure directly the Earths gravitational acceleration on antimatter. To achieve this goal, the AE$mathrm{bar{g}}$IS collaboration will produce a pulsed, cold (100 mK) antihydrogen beam with a velocity of a few 100 m/s and measure the magnitude of the vertical deflection of the beam from a straight path. 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, to the best of our knowledge, the first direct measurement of antiproton annihilation in a segmented silicon sensor, the first step towards designing a position sensitive silicon detector for the AE$mathrm{bar{g}}$IS experiment. We also present a first comparison with Monte Carlo simulations (GEANT4) for antiproton energies below 5 MeV

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