Precision measurement of the mass difference between light nuclei and anti-nuclei

Abstract

The measurement of the mass differences for systems bound by the strong force has reached a very high precision with protons and anti-protons(1,2). The extension of such measurement from (anti-)baryons to (anti-) nuclei allows one to probe any difference in the interactions between nucleons and anti-nucleons encoded in the (anti-) nuclei masses. This force is a remnant of the underlying strong interaction among quarks and gluons and can be described by effective theories(3), but cannot yet be directly derived from quantum chromodynamics. Here we report a measurement of the difference between the ratios of the mass and charge of deuterons (d) and anti-deuterons ((d) over bar), and He-3 and (3)(He) over bar nuclei carried out with the ALICE (A Large Ion Collider Experiment)(4) detector in Pb-Pb collisions at a centre-of-mass energy per nucleon pair of 2.76 TeV. Our direct measurement of the mass-over-charge differences confirms CPT invariance to an unprecedented precision in the sector of light nuclei(5,6). This fundamental symmetry of nature, which exchanges particles with anti-particles, implies that all physics laws are the same under the simultaneous reversal of charge(s) (charge conjugation C), reflection of spatial coordinates (parity transformation P) and time inversion (T).