Mainz 2022 – wissenschaftliches Programm

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HK: Fachverband Physik der Hadronen und Kerne

HK 54: Nuclear Astrophysics III

HK 54.5: Vortrag

Mittwoch, 30. März 2022, 17:15–17:30, HK-H10

Measurement of the inelastic cross sections of antinuclei with ALICE and the implications for indirect dark matter searches — •Stephan Koenigstorfer for the ALICE collaboration — Technische Universität München

Antinuclei in cosmic rays are considered a unique probe for signals from exotic physics, such as WIMP Dark Matter annihilations. Indeed, these channels are characterised by a very low astrophysical background, which comes from antinuclei produced by high energy cosmic ray interaction with ordinary matter. In order to make quantitative predictions for antinuclei fluxes near earth, both the production and annihilation cross sections of antinuclei need to be accurately known down to low energies.

In ultra relativistic pp and Pb-Pb collisions at the CERN LHC, matter and antimatter are abundantly produced in almost equal amounts, allowing us to study the production of antinuclei and measure their absorption in the detector material. The antinuclei absorption cross section is evaluated on the average ALICE material. Using this result, we then predict the transparency of our galaxy to anti-3He from both dark matter annihilations and high energy cosmic ray collisions. In this talk we present the first measurements of the anti-3He and anti-3H absorption cross section with ALICE and we discuss the implications of these results for indirect Dark Matter searches using cosmic antinuclei.