Moving into higher fields and collective behavior: recent advancements in the direction of matter-antimatter pair plasmas

The ultimate goals of the APEX (A Positron Electron eXperiment) Collaboration are the generation and investigation of confined, strongly magnetized, electron-positron plasmas in the laboratory. Our road map to achieving this requires unifying and advancing state-of-the-art physics and engineering in several areas, including: extended accumulation and high-capacity storage of large numbers of positrons, originating from a world-class source; two superconducting, tabletop-sized toroidal confinement devices with complementary magnetic topologies (a dipole and a stellarator), in which the positrons will be combined with electrons and their plasma properties studied; and the development and verification of a number of essential enabling techniques --- e.g., efficient transport of positrons across magnetic flux surfaces and subsequent trapping (previously demonstrated in the single-particle regime [1, 2]). This poster will provide a broad overview of recent key progress along that road map, such as non-neutral plasma trap development [3]; the lossless injection of positrons into an electron cloud dense enough to generate a substantial space charge [4]; the development of the "primary" positron beam down to lower energies [5]; the extension of injection techniques to higher fields, as well as much broader range of velocity distributions for the incoming positrons; and the development status of the two toroidal traps.