Towards antihydrogen spectroscopy and CW Lyman-alpha via four-wave mixing in mercury

Abstract

During 2018, the ATRAP collaboration demonstrated the production of $5 \pm 2$ trapped antihydrogen per trial. Improved positron accumulation increased reliability and reduced loading times, making 1.5 million positrons available for antihydrogen production every 15 seconds. This led to a better understanding the positron plasma within the ATRAP nested Penning-Ioffe trap. More recent progress on a CW Lyman-alpha laser at 121 nm is presented. The goal of the laser is to produce 1 $\mu$W of continuous, coherent Lyman-alpha radiation by four-wave mixing in mercury. Simulations of a Zeeman slower with nested radial trap suggest that such a laser can slow hydrogen to increase atom flux at 40 m/s by a conservative factor of 5 to 10.