Antiprotons for plasma heating

The design of the new Antiproton Decelerator (AD) at CERN will allow the easy measurement of the energy deposit of the antiproton-proton annihilation remnants within a hydrogen plasma. For this purpose, a reaction chamber filled with gaseous hydrogen is put into the beam line. The antiprotons coming directly from the AD at 7 MeV/c or from a Penning trap are injected into the chamber through a window in such a way, that they come to rest at the center of the chamber, where annihilation occurs. The resulting high energy annihilation products are trapped in the chamber using a pulsed magnetic bottle. The energy deposit in the hydrogen gas can then be measured using Schlieren optics or an interferometric set-up, by determining the density changes due to the temperature rise within the gas.