An international collaboration of researchers has successfully demonstrated laser cooling of positronium, a short-lived hydrogen-like atom, for the first time. This provides an ideal testing ground for bound-state quantum electrodynamics. The Antihydrogen Experiment: The Antihydrogen Experiment: Gravity, Interferometry, Spectroscopy (AEGIS) collaboration has carried out several important experiments at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) to achieve this breakthrough.
Sadiq Rangwala, professor in the Light and Matter Group at the Raman Research Institute (RRI), an autonomous institute of the Department of Science and Technology (DST), Government of India, is part of the AEGIS collaboration that includes physicists from 19 European groups and an Indian group. Is.
Professor Rangwala is leading the Indian contribution to the AEGIS collaboration with significant contributions in various areas including the design of diagnostics for laser beam alignment deployed in the laser setup at the CERN accelerator. Even though this area has been under active research since the late 1980s, several technological innovations and the creation of state-of-the-art lasers have finally facilitated laser cooling of positronium.
He said that this research now opens the door to the creation of exotic multi-particle systems such as Bose-Einstein condensates of this unique system. This is an important precursor experiment to the creation of anti-hydrogen in the AEGIS experiment, which has a long-term goal of testing the equivalence principle.