Development of narrowband lasers for spectroscopy of antiprotonic atoms

Abstract

We review some lasers developed by the ASACUSA collaboration of CERN, to carry out spectroscopy of antiprotonic helium atoms. These lasers were based on the technique of continuous-wave injection seeding of pulsed lasers. The laser output covered the wavelength regions 264–1154 nm, with peak powers of ~ 1 MW and spectral resolutions of 6–40 MHz. The devices were recently used to measure the transition frequencies of antiprotonic helium atoms to a fractional precision of several parts in ~ 109.