A new technique for rapidly generating a sequence of target plasmas in a Penning-Malmberg trap is presented and applied in the first demonstration of cavity-resonant cooling in a plasma. This "reservoir'' technique further enables the in situ magnetic field to be measured to high precision by microwave ECR spectroscopy. A precision antihydrogen gravity experiment being constructed at CERN will rely on this method, as there is no other method with comparable absolute, spatial, and temporal resolution which can be implemented in the Penning-Malmberg trap. These cavity and microwave measurements require accessing new regimes with the plasma parallel energy analyzer, to which end the sensitivity of the latter technique has been increased twenty-fold.

Eric Hunter