AsianScientist (Jun 2, 2014) – As part of a series of experiments designed to resolve one of the deepest mysteries in physics today, researchers from RIKEN, in collaboration with the University of Mainz, GSI Darmstadt and the Max Planck Institute for Physics at Heidelberg, have made the most precise direct measurement of the magnetic moment of a proton to date.
The work, published in Nature, seeks to answer the fundamental question of why we exist at all. It is believed that some 13 billion years ago, the Big Bang generated equal amounts of matter and antimatter, which annihilate when they collide. Yet the universe today seems to contain only matter, a profound mystery that scientists have long sought to address.
Work is being carried out from many fronts to detect differences that would explain the disparity between matter and antimatter in the observable universe. One promising route is to compare the magnetic moments of particles and their antimatter conjugates, as even a tiny difference could explain the matter-antimatter asymmetry.
Researchers have now reached an important milestone by directly measuring the moment of a single proton with high precision, based on spectroscopy of a single particle in a Penning trap.
“This important quantity has never been measured directly and is so far only known at a relative precision of about 10 parts per billion, based on hyperfine spectroscopy of a MASER in a magnetic field. However, this required significant theoretical corrections to extract the proton’s magnetic moment from the measurement,” explains Dr. Andreas Mooser, first author of the paper.
The present study reports the first direct high precision measurement of the proton magnetic moment at a fractional precision of 3 parts per billion, improving the 42-year-old “fundamental constant” by a factor of three.
“Using the new method will allow this value to be improved by at least a factor of thousand, providing a stringent test of matter-antimatter symmetry,” said RIKEN researcher Dr. Stefan Ulmer, second author of the paper and spokesperson of the BASE collaboration at CERN.
The article can be found at: Mooser et al. (2014) Direct high-precision measurement of the magnetic moment of the proton.
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Source: RIKEN.
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