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Description
Positronium is the hydrogenic bound state of a matter-antimatter particle pair, the positron and electron. It has several properties making it an excellent test subject for fundamental physics: 1) it is described almost entirely by QED, 2) it is an eigenstate of the charge symmetry operator, and 3) it is made only of leptons. This allows precision tests of bound-state QED and symmetry violation within a purely leptonic system. I will give an overview of the Ps atom and how it is produced then describe the challenges of precision QED tests which I will put in the context of energy interval measurements of the n = 2 fine structure transitions. Measurements performed recently at University College London have improved the precision of the measured energy intervals by an order of magnitude, however to test the most precise QED calculations requires another order of magnitude improvement.
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