Measurement of the ground-state hyperfine splitting of antihydrogen

The ASACUSA collaboration at the Antiproton Decelerator of CERN is planning to measure the ground-state hyperfine splitting of antihydrogen using an atomic beam line, consisting of a cusp trap as a source of partially polarized antihydrogen atoms, a radiofrequency spin-flip cavity, a superconducting sextupole magnet as spin analyser, and an antihydrogen detector. This will be a measurement of the antiproton magnetic moment, and also a test of the CPT invariance. Monte Carlo simulations predict that the antihydrogen ground-state hyperfine splitting can be determined with a relative precision of ~10−7. The first preliminary measurements of the hyperfine transitions will start in 2011.