Today, the BASE Collaboration achieved a major milestone: This morning, they successfully moved their transportable trap BASE-STEP, loaded with protons, inside the Antiproton Decelerator (AD) hall for the first time - a proof of principle that paves the way for future groundbreaking antiproton precision measurements. After everything went smooth and the autonomously operated superconducting magnet with a 10-proton-loaded trap, operated on batteries, was moved from the experimental zone to the exit of the AD facility and back, the team was relieved. The entire transport-campaign took about 2.5h. The next step is to transport the trap with protons outside of the AD hall early next week and to repeat it with antiprotons, which is planned for 2025.

It took the team around Christian Smorra (HHU Düsseldorf) and Stefan Ulmer (HHU Düsseldorf/RIKEN) less than 4 years to turn Smorra's and Ulmer’s ideas of trap-transport into reality, from initiating the technical development to the actual transport of a loaded, autonomous, open, superconducting Penning-trap system.

Since the start of their experiments in 2014, the BASE experimentalists are looking to see if nature treats matter and antimatter differently. Therefore, the researchers compare the properties of protons and antiprotons, such as their charge-to-mass ratios or magnetic moments, to an extreme precision. The transport out of CERN’s accelerator environment to dedicated precision laboratory space at Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf is a logical next step to increase the accuracy of precision measurements.  

"From a technical point of view, transporting antiprotons comes with more stringent vacuum requirements, but is apart from that only a change of sign in the trap-polarity. It’s thus an enormous success and opens the door for next-generation antiproton measurements at much higher precision," emphasises Ulmer enthusiastically. 

Read more about BASE here.