The Penning trap system used by the BASE experiment

A cut-away schematic of the Penning trap system used by BASE. The experiment receives antiprotons from CERN's AD; negative hydrogen ions are formed during injection into the apparatus. The set-up works with only a pair of particles at a time, while a cloud of a few hundred others are held in the reservoir trap, for future use. Here, an antiproton is in the measurement trap, while the negative hydyrogen ion is in held by the downstream park electrode. When the antiproton has been measured, it is moved to the upstream park electrode and the hydrogen ion is brought in to the measurement trap. This is repeated thousands of times, enabling a high-precision comparison of the charge-to-mass ratios of the two particles.