Autoresonant excitation of antiproton plasmas

Phys Rev Lett. 2011 Jan 14;106(2):025002. doi: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.106.025002. Epub 2011 Jan 14.

Abstract

We demonstrate controllable excitation of the center-of-mass longitudinal motion of a thermal antiproton plasma using a swept-frequency autoresonant drive. When the plasma is cold, dense, and highly collective in nature, we observe that the entire system behaves as a single-particle nonlinear oscillator, as predicted by a recent theory. In contrast, only a fraction of the antiprotons in a warm plasma can be similarly excited. Antihydrogen was produced and trapped by using this technique to drive antiprotons into a positron plasma, thereby initiating atomic recombination.