Development of nuclear emulsions operating in vacuum for the AEgIS experiment

Abstract

For the first time the AEgIS (Antihydrogen Experiment: Gravity, Interferometry, Spectroscopy) experiment will measure the Earth's local gravitational acceleration g on antimatter through the evaluation of the vertical displacement of an antihydrogen horizontal beam. This will be a model independent test of the Weak Equivalence Principle at the base of the general relativity. The initial goal of a g measurement with a relative uncertainty of 1% will be achieved with less than 1000 detected antihydrogens, provided that their vertical position could be determined with a precision of a few micrometers. An emulsion based detector is very suitable for this purpose featuring an intrinsic sub-micrometric spatial resolution. Nevertheless, the AEgIS experiment requires unprecedented operational conditions for this type of detector, namely vacuum environment and very low temperature. An intense R&D activity is presently going on to optimize the detector for the AEgIS experimental requirements with rather encouraging results.