The antimatter equivalent of atomic hydrogen—antihydrogen—is an outstanding testbed for precision studies of matter–antimatter symmetry. Here we report on the simultaneous observation of both accessible hyperfine components of the 1S–2S transition in trapped antihydrogen. We determine the 2S hyperfine splitting in antihydrogen and—by comparing our results with those obtained in hydrogen—constrain the charge–parity–time-reversal symmetry-violating coefficients in the standard model extension framework. Our experimental protocol allows the characterization of the relevant spectral lines in 1 day, representing a 70-fold improvement in the data-taking rate. We show that the spectroscopy is applicable to laser-cooled antihydrogen with important implications for future tests of fundamental symmetries. The ALPHA Collaboration reports measurements of the hyperfine components of the 1S–2S transition in trapped antihydrogen. They interpret the results as a test of the invariance of charge–parity–time-reversal symmetry.

The photon—the quantum excitation of the electromagnetic field—is massless but carries momentum. A photon can therefore exert a force on an object upon collision 1 . Slowing the translational motion of atoms and ions by application of such a force 2 , 3 , known as laser cooling, was first demonstrated 40 years ago 4 , 5 . It revolutionized atomic physics over the following decades 6 – 8 , and it is now a workhorse in many fields, including studies on quantum degenerate gases, quantum information, atomic clocks and tests of fundamental physics. However, this technique has not yet been applied to antimatter. Here we demonstrate laser cooling of antihydrogen 9 , the antimatter atom consisting of an antiproton and a positron. By exciting the 1S–2P transition in antihydrogen with pulsed, narrow-linewidth, Lyman-α laser radiation 10 , 11 , we Doppler-cool a sample of magnetically trapped antihydrogen. Although we apply laser cooling in only one dimension, the trap couples the longitudinal and transverse motions of the anti-atoms, leading to cooling in all three dimensions. We observe a reduction in the median transverse energy by more than an order of magnitude—with a substantial fraction of the anti-atoms attaining submicroelectronvolt transverse kinetic energies. We also report the observation of the laser-driven 1S–2S transition in samples of laser-cooled antihydrogen atoms. The observed spectral line is approximately four times narrower than that obtained without laser cooling. The demonstration of laser cooling and its immediate application has far-reaching implications for antimatter studies. A more localized, denser and colder sample of antihydrogen will drastically improve spectroscopic 11 – 13 and gravitational 14 studies of antihydrogen in ongoing experiments. Furthermore, the demonstrated ability to manipulate the motion of antimatter atoms by laser light will potentially provide ground-breaking opportunities for future experiments, such as anti-atomic fountains, anti-atom interferometry and the creation of antimatter molecules.

The ALPHA experiment at CERN is designed to produce and trap antihydrogen to the purpose of making a precise comparison with hydrogen. The basic technique consists of driving an antihydrogen resonance which will cause the antiatom to leave the trap and annihilate. The main background to antihydrogen detection is due to cosmic rays. When an experimental cycle extends for several minutes, while the number of trapped antihydrogen remains fixed, background rejection can become challenging. Machine learning methods have been employed in ALPHA for several years, leading to a dramatic reduction of the background contamination. This allowed ALPHA to perform the first laser spectroscopy experiment on antihydrogen.

The simultaneous control of the density and particle number of non-neutral plasmas confined in Penning-Malmberg traps is demonstrated. Control is achieved by setting the plasma's density by applying a rotating electric field while simultaneously fixing its axial potential via evaporative cooling. This novel method is particularly useful for stabilizing positron plasmas, as the procedures used to collect positrons from radioactive sources typically yield plasmas with variable densities and particle numbers; it also simplifies optimization studies that require plasma parameter scans. The reproducibility achieved by applying this technique to the positron and electron plasmas used by the ALPHA antihydrogen experiment at CERN, combined with other developments, contributed to a 10-fold increase in the antiatom trapping rate.

The ALPHA project at the CERN AD is testing fundamental symmetries between matter and antimatter using trapped antihydrogen atoms. The spectrum of the antihydrogen atom may be compared to ordinary hydrogen where it has been measured very precisely. CPT conservation, which underpins our current theoretical framework, requires equality of the masses and charges of matter and its antimatter partners, so antihydrogen spectroscopy presents a path to precision CPT tests. I will discuss the techniques used by ALPHA to trap more than 8000 antihydrogen atoms in 2016, and interrogate them for 600s. The 1S-2S transition in antihydrogen has been observed for the first time, and it agrees with its hydrogen counterpart within an uncertainty of 400 kHz or 0.2 ppb. The charge of the antihydrogen atom has been bounded below [Formula: see text]. A value of 1420.4 0.5MHz for the hyperfine splitting has been obtained from observation of the positron spin resonance spectrum.

In 1906, Theodore Lyman discovered his eponymous series of transitions in the extreme-ultraviolet region of the atomic hydrogen spectrum 1 , 2 . The patterns in the hydrogen spectrum helped to establish the emerging theory of quantum mechanics, which we now know governs the world at the atomic scale. Since then, studies involving the Lyman-α line—the 1S–2P transition at a wavelength of 121.6 nanometres—have played an important part in physics and astronomy, as one of the most fundamental atomic transitions in the Universe. For example, this transition has long been used by astronomers studying the intergalactic medium and testing cosmological models via the so-called ‘Lyman-α forest’ 3 of absorption lines at different redshifts. Here we report the observation of the Lyman-α transition in the antihydrogen atom, the antimatter counterpart of hydrogen. Using narrow-line-width, nanosecond-pulsed laser radiation, the 1S–2P transition was excited in magnetically trapped antihydrogen. The transition frequency at a field of 1.033 tesla was determined to be 2,466,051.7 ± 0.12 gigahertz (1 σ uncertainty) and agrees with the prediction for hydrogen to a precision of 5 × 10 −8 . Comparisons of the properties of antihydrogen with those of its well-studied matter equivalent allow precision tests of fundamental symmetries between matter and antimatter. Alongside the ground-state hyperfine 4 , 5 and 1S–2S transitions 6 , 7 recently observed in antihydrogen, the Lyman-α transition will permit laser cooling of antihydrogen 8 , 9 , thus providing a cold and dense sample of anti-atoms for precision spectroscopy and gravity measurements 10 . In addition to the observation of this fundamental transition, this work represents both a decisive technological step towards laser cooling of antihydrogen, and the extension of antimatter spectroscopy to quantum states possessing orbital angular momentum.

In 1928, Dirac published an equation 1 that combined quantum mechanics and special relativity. Negative-energy solutions to this equation, rather than being unphysical as initially thought, represented a class of hitherto unobserved and unimagined particles—antimatter. The existence of particles of antimatter was confirmed with the discovery of the positron 2 (or anti-electron) by Anderson in 1932, but it is still unknown why matter, rather than antimatter, survived after the Big Bang. As a result, experimental studies of antimatter 3 – 7 , including tests of fundamental symmetries such as charge–parity and charge–parity–time, and searches for evidence of primordial antimatter, such as antihelium nuclei, have high priority in contemporary physics research. The fundamental role of the hydrogen atom in the evolution of the Universe and in the historical development of our understanding of quantum physics makes its antimatter counterpart—the antihydrogen atom—of particular interest. Current standard-model physics requires that hydrogen and antihydrogen have the same energy levels and spectral lines. The laser-driven 1S–2S transition was recently observed 8 in antihydrogen. Here we characterize one of the hyperfine components of this transition using magnetically trapped atoms of antihydrogen and compare it to model calculations for hydrogen in our apparatus. We find that the shape of the spectral line agrees very well with that expected for hydrogen and that the resonance frequency agrees with that in hydrogen to about 5 kilohertz out of 2.5 × 10 15 hertz. This is consistent with charge–parity–time invariance at a relative precision of 2 × 10 −12 —two orders of magnitude more precise than the previous determination 8 —corresponding to an absolute energy sensitivity of 2 × 10 −20 GeV.

Nature 548, 66–69 (2017); doi:10.1038/nature23446 Owing to a technical error, author J. S. Wurtele was listed incorrectly as a corresponding author instead of author J. S. Hangst in the HTML version of this Letter (the PDF version was correct). This has been corrected online.

J-PARC KOTO Collaboration J. K. Ahn, K. Y. Baek, S. Banno, B. Beckford, B. Brubaker, T. Cai, M. Campbell, C. Carruth, S. H. Chen, S. Chu, J. Comfort, Y. T. Duh, T. Furukawa, H. Haraguchi, T. Hineno,Y. B. Hsiung, M. Hutcheson, T. Inagaki, M. Isoe, E. Iwai, T. Kamibayashi, I. Kamiji, N. Kawasaki, E. J. Kim, Y. J. Kim, J. W. Ko, T. K. Komatsubara, A. S. Kurilin, G. H. Lee, H. S. Lee, J. W. Lee, S. K. Lee, G. Y. Lim, C. Lin, J. Ma, Y. Maeda9,24,∗, T. Masuda, T. Matsumura, D. Mcfarland, J. Micallef, K. Miyazaki, K. Morgan, R. Murayama, D. Naito, K. Nakagiri, Y. Nakajima, Y. Nakaya H. Nanjo, T. Nomura, T. Nomura, Y. Odani, R. Ogata, H. Okuno, T. Ota, Y. D. Ri, M. Sasaki, N. Sasao, K. Sato, T. Sato, S. Seki, T. Shimogawa, T. Shinkawa, S. Shinohara, K. Shiomi, J. S. Son, J. Stevens, S. Su,Y. Sugiyama, S. Suzuki,Y. Tajima, G. Takahashi,Y. Takashima, M. Tecchio, I. Teo, M. Togawa, T. Toyoda, Y. C. Tung, T. Usuki, Y. W. Wah, H. Watanabe, N. Whallon, J. K. Woo, J. Xu, M. Yamaga, S. Yamamoto, T. Yamanaka, H. Yamauchi, Y. Yanagida, H. Yokota, H. Y. Yoshida, and H. Yoshimoto

We searched for the $CP$-violating rare decay of neutral kaon, $K_{L} \to \pi^0 \nu \overline{\nu}$, in data from the first 100 hours of physics running in 2013 of the J-PARC KOTO experiment. One candidate event was observed while $0.34\pm0.16$ background events were expected. We set an upper limit of $5.1\times10^{-8}$ for the branching fraction at the 90\% confidence level (C.L.). An upper limit of $3.7\times10^{-8}$ at the 90\% C.L. for the $K_{L} \to \pi^{0} X^{0}$decay was also set for the first time, where $X^{0}$ is an invisible particle with a mass of 135 MeV/$c^{2}$.

Antihydrogen, a positron bound to an antiproton, is the simplest anti-atom. Its structure and properties are expected to mirror those of the hydrogen atom. Prospects for precision comparisons of the two, as tests of fundamental symmetries, are driving a vibrant programme of research. In this regard, a limiting factor in most experiments is the availability of large numbers of cold ground state antihydrogen atoms. Here, we describe how an improved synthesis process results in a maximum rate of 10.5 ± 0.6 atoms trapped and detected per cycle, corresponding to more than an order of magnitude improvement over previous work. Additionally, we demonstrate how detailed control of electron, positron and antiproton plasmas enables repeated formation and trapping of antihydrogen atoms, with the simultaneous retention of atoms produced in previous cycles. We report a record of 54 detected annihilation events from a single release of the trapped anti-atoms accumulated from five consecutive cycles.

The 1S–2S transition in magnetically trapped atoms of antihydrogen is observed, and its frequency is shown to be consistent with that expected for hydrogen. Testing to high precision whether matter behaves like antimatter could provide clues to one of the biggest puzzles in modern physics: why does the observable Universe consist almost entirely of matter? After all, the Standard Model predicts that after the Big Bang the Universe should have been made up of equal amounts of matter and antimatter. Antimatter is difficult to produce and characterize because it annihilates when it comes in contact with matter. But recent advances at CERN's Antiproton Decelerator have allowed researchers to trap and measure both antiprotons and antihydrogen. Now the ALPHA Collaboration at CERN reports the first spectroscopic characterization of antihydrogen, exciting the 1S to 2S transition with laser light. The transition frequency is consistent with that of hydrogen. The spectrum of ordinary hydrogen has been characterized to extremely high precision, so improvements in antihydrogen spectroscopy will yield highly sensitive tests of matter–antimatter symmetry. The spectrum of the hydrogen atom has played a central part in fundamental physics over the past 200 years. Historical examples of its importance include the wavelength measurements of absorption lines in the solar spectrum by Fraunhofer, the identification of transition lines by Balmer, Lyman and others, the empirical description of allowed wavelengths by Rydberg, the quantum model of Bohr, the capability of quantum electrodynamics to precisely predict transition frequencies, and modern measurements of the 1S–2S transition by Hänsch1 to a precision of a few parts in 1015. Recent technological advances have allowed us to focus on antihydrogen—the antimatter equivalent of hydrogen2,3,4. The Standard Model predicts that there should have been equal amounts of matter and antimatter in the primordial Universe after the Big Bang, but today’s Universe is observed to consist almost entirely of ordinary matter. This motivates the study of antimatter, to see if there is a small asymmetry in the laws of physics that govern the two types of matter. In particular, the CPT (charge conjugation, parity reversal and time reversal) theorem, a cornerstone of the Standard Model, requires that hydrogen and antihydrogen have the same spectrum. Here we report the observation of the 1S–2S transition in magnetically trapped atoms of antihydrogen. We determine that the frequency of the transition, which is driven by two photons from a laser at 243 nanometres, is consistent with that expected for hydrogen in the same environment. This laser excitation of a quantum state of an atom of antimatter represents the most precise measurement performed on an anti-atom. Our result is consistent with CPT invariance at a relative precision of about 2 × 10−10.

Stochastic acceleration applied to 1,000 trapped antihydrogen atoms yields a 20-fold reduction of the experimental upper bound on the magnitude of the charge of antihydrogen, which is expected to be charge neutral.

We searched for the CP-violating rare decay of neutral kaon, K_L→π^0 νν, in data from the first 100 hours of physics running in 2013 of the J-PARC KOTO experiment. One candidate event was observed while 0.34±0.16 background events were expected. We set an upper limit of 5.1×10^-8 for the branching fraction at the 90% confidence level (C.L.). An upper limit of 3.7×10^-8 at the 90% C.L. for the K_L→π^0 X^0decay was also set for the first time, where X^0 is an invisible particle with a mass of 135 MeV/c^2.