Masterarbeit / master’s thesis

This thesis summarises my tasks and efforts during the Technical Student Programme at CERN in 2016/17. First, the main experiment Aegis and its theoretical background are introduced. Aegis is located at CERN’s Antiproton Decelerator (AD) and its main scientific goal is to measure Earth’s gravitational acceleration on antihydrogen. To enhance the accuracy of this gravitational acceleration measurement a doubly sympathetic cooling scheme was proposed by Michael Doser (CERN) and Alban Kellerbauer (University of Heidelberg), involving antiprotons, a cationic and an anionic species, which are simultaneously confined in a penning trap, with only one actively cooled (cationic) species. The focus of this thesis lies on testing the functionality of this doubly sympathetic cooling scheme using a penning trap simulation program called Simbuca, which calculates the coulomb force on a GPU, what reduces the simulation times significant. Besides, the theoretical physical background is presented, which is necessary to follow the subsequent simulations. The performed Simbuca-simulations are analysed in detail and the behaviour of the trapped, charged particles is described. Furthermore, although a sympathetic cooling effect between the oppositely charged particles was clearly observed, the functionality of the proposed scheme could only be confirmed with severe limitations.