Detecting Antimatter

Detecting Antimatter

Title of the project: Study of Low Energy Antiproton Annihilations on Nuclei
Name of the VDSP student(s) & image credits: Viktoria Kraxberger
Project supervised by: Eberhard Widmann

About me/us: Hi, my name is Viktoria and I am in the second year of my PhD at the Stefan-Meyer-Institute for Subatomic Physics, where I work on the project of antiproton annihilation studies. The goal is to study the annihilation of low energy antiprotons on different nuclei by measuring properties of the annihilation products with a cube-like pixel detector that surrounds a target foil.

Image: As my PhD project is made up of both hands-on work in the lab as well as simulations and data analysis I chose to show this also in this image. The background image shows three overlaid photographs which stand for the lab work: A photo of rainbow-colored ribbon cables which are used to read out a detector I work with, a "mirror-selfie" taken through a vacuum pipe, where the mirror is actually a BGO crystal scintillator and an aerial photograph I took of CERN, as this is where the experiment is located. The top drawing stands for the simulations and data analysis I did so far. It shows a sketch of the future detector chamber, which has a target foil in the center on which the antiprotons annihilate. The smaller dots show simulated signals in the detector from which I could reconstruct the tracks (lines) and therefore find the annihilation vertex in the center.