A Positron Electron eXperiment (APEX): Recent highlights and coming attractions

The APEX Collaboration aims to create and study confined, low-temperature, long-lived, e+e- “pair plasmas” in the laboratory. Our motivation is to conduct novel tests of basic plasma science predictions (e.g., involving transport and regime-crossing) in this unusually mass-symmetric, strongly magnetized regime (with potential insights into related cosmological/astrophysical systems). Toward these ends, we work at the intersection of several fields, including magnetic confinement, non-neutral plasmas, high-temperature-superconducting (HTS) coils, and antimatter science.

This poster will provide an overview of recent highlights from our collaboration. These have included studies of pure e- plasmas in APEX-LD (our compact levitated dipole trap), optimization and engineering design reviews for EPOS (our tabletop-sized, optimized stellarator); gamma-detector-array-based measurements of e+ transport and cooling in our supported dipole trap; e- plasma manipulations in our linear, “multi-cell” trap; and accompanying numerical/theoretical modeling. The poster will also look forward to plans for next year, when the FRM-II research neutron source is now scheduled to return to user operation. In preparation for this, we will install our Surko trap (a.k.a. buffer-gas trap, or BGT) and APEX-LD on the NEPOMUC e+ beam there; this will allow us to combine significant numbers of positrons and electrons (N > 10^8) and take first measurements of the resulting interacting ensembles.