MAGNETIC TRAPPING OF ATOMIC HYDROGEN: FIRST SUCCESSFUL EXPERIMENTS

First magnetic trapping experiments of atomic hydrogen were performed in our lab in the end of 2023. Cryogenic hydrogen dissociator was used to split H2 molecules to atoms at 0.7 K. After that the flux of low-field seekers was transferred down the magnetic field gradient and loaded into the trapping cell. Transfer line has three stages of thermal accommodators at 0.4, 0.25 and 0.15 K. With the trap magnets loaded to create effective trap height of 0.55 K we measured incoming flux over 5⋅10^13 atoms/sec in the temperature range 0.15-0.3 K and were able to load total number of over 10^15 atoms within 5-10 minutes. At the next stage we will perform evaporative cooling of the trapped gas down to 1 mK and complete the UV laser system at 243 nm to perform optical 1S-2S diagnostics of the trapped gas. Finally, the cloud of H will be transferred to the second, more shallow trap T2 and cooled further down to several tens of μK. High precision optical spectroscopy will be attempted with such cold H gas as well as spectroscopical detection of the Gravitational Quantum States of H above the surface of superfluid helium.