Demonstration of laser cooling of antihydrogen and its applications in precision antimatter experiments.

Laser cooling is a technique which has revolutionized atom physics in the past 40 years, and is the basis of many of modern experiments in the field. However, until now, it has never been applied to an antimatter system. Here, we report the first demonstration of laser cooling of antihydrogen, the simplest form of atomic antimatter. By driving the 1S-2P transition in antihydrogen via pulsed Lyman-alpha radiation at 121 nm, we have performed Doppler cooling of magnetically trapped antihydrogen in the ALPHA experiment at CERN. In this talk, we will present preliminary results on our first laser cooling experiment. Furthermore, we will discuss far-reaching implications of the laser cooling technique in antimatter physics, and entirely new class of precision tools it will enable. These include anti-atomic fountains and anti-atom interferometers.