Progress with Cold antihydrogen

The creation of cold antihydrogen by the ATHENA and ATRAP collaborations, working at CERN’s unique Antiproton Decelerator (AD) facility, has ushered in a new era in atomic physics. This contribution will briefly review recent results from the ATHENA experiment. These include discussions of antiproton slowing down in a cold positron gas during antihydrogen formation, information derived on the dependence of the antihydrogen formation rate upon the temperature of the stored positron plasma and, finally, upon the spatial distribution of the emitted anti-atoms. We will discuss the implications of these studies for the major outstanding goal of trapping samples of antihydrogen for precise spectroscopic comparisons with hydrogen. The physics motivations for undertaking these challenging experiments will be briefly recalled