AEGIS: a new experiment to measure the gravitational interaction of antihydrogen

Experimental studies of Antihydrogen have a short history, but an ambitious future: a first generation of experiments which produced large numbers of antihydrogen atoms for the first time in 2002 has given place to a second wave of experiments which have just now managed to trap and  are attempting the next steps of measuring and cooling antihydrogen atoms, with the long term goal of carrying out precision laser spectroscopy comparisons of the spectra of hydrogen and antihydrogen, and thus perform a precision test of the CPT symmetry. In parallel, advances in other fields have made possible the concept of a pulsed beam of antihydrogen atoms, which opens the door to measuring the gravitational interaction of (neutral) antimatter. The AEGIS experiment, which in a first step aims to reach a 1% precision on the gravitational interaction of antihydrogen by measuring its free fall over its parabolic trajectory, will be presented, and the technologies from a variety of fields on which it relies will be discussed.