- Project: Bachelor’s thesis in the context of the Technical Physics master course at TU Wien, Austria
- Collaboration / Institute: ASACUSA (CERN, Geneva, Switzerland) / Stefan Meyer Institute for Subatomic Physics (SMI, Vienna, Austria)
- Date: September 2014
- Time Invested: 4 months
- Links: CERN document server
- Keywords: particle physics, anti-hydrogen spectroscopy, detector simulation, data analysis
Abstract
In the Standard Model of particle physics, CPT symmetry is regarded as invariant. In order to test this prediction, the ASACUSA collaboration (“Atomic Spectroscopy And Collisions Using Slow Antiprotons”) aims to make a very precise measurement of the hyperfine structure of antihydrogen with a Rabi-like experiment. The comparison of the experimentally-obtained antihydrogen transition frequencies with those of hydrogen allows for a direct test of CPT symmetry. The spectrometer line of the ASACUSA HBAR-GSHFS (“Antihydrogen ground state hyperfine splitting”) experiment consists of a particle source, a spin flip-inducing microwave cavity, a spin-analyzing sextupole magnet, and a detector. In the course of the work for this thesis, a single scintillation detector as used in the hodoscopes of the detector at the end of the spectrometer line was simulated using the particle physics toolkit Geant4. Subsequent analysis of the simulation data allows for an estimate of the minimal uncertainty in determining the location of a particle’s point of impact on the detector geometry.