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Cosmic-ray antinuclei are one of the most promising observables to detect rare processes such as dark matter particle annihilation or decay. Indeed, the astrophysical antinuclei backgrounds expected to be produced via cosmic ray collisions with the interstellar medium (ISM) are extremely low. Hence, with current instrument sensitivity, the detection of even a single (heavy) cosmic-ray antinucleus could reveal new exotic processes. Recently the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS-02) reported to have collected a bunch of events compatible with anti-Helium nuclei. While highly unexpected from standard processes, these unexpected events renew the interest of the community for cosmic-ray anti-nuclei and motivate efforts to keep under control the astrophysical background.
In the first part of the talk, Yoann Génolini and Pierre Salati will review how cosmic-ray propagation inside the Milky Way is modeled. They will present the various time-scales at stake and will elaborate on why precise cross-sections measurements are important for an accurate derivation of the cosmic-ray fluxes.
In the second part of the talk, Ivan Vorobyev will discuss recent results on antihelium-3 inelastic interactions with matter obtained by the ALICE Collaboration (arXiv:2202.01549). For these studies, the ALICE detector material has served as a target for antihelium-3 nuclei produced in high-energy collisions at the LHC, which allowed for the extraction of antihelium-3 inelastic interaction cross section in the momentum range below 10 GeV/c. The results have been used as an essential input for the GALPROP program to propagate the antihelium-3 nuclei through the Galaxy. The loss of antihelium-3 flux due to inelastic interactions has been estimated for the first time based on experimental data, both for antinuclei stemming from dark-matter decays and for those originating from cosmic-ray interactions with the interstellar medium.
Yoann Genolini is a lecturer at Université Savoie Mont Blanc (USMB)/LAPTh. He received his PhD in theoretical physics at the LAPTh (Annecy, France) in 2017. After which he was a postdoctoral fellow at the Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB). He joined the Niels Bohr Institute (NBI) of Copenhague in 2019 for two years. He was then hired as a lecturer at USMB. His research focuses on astroparticle physics, notably cosmic-ray transport and phenomenology. He is also interested in dark matter phenomenology and its indirect probe by astrophysical observables, especially those related to properties of compact objects.
Pierre Salati is currently Emeritus Professor at Université Savoie Mont Blanc (USMB)/LAPTh. He engaged in research back in 1981 and has been working on topics related to cosmology and particle astrophysics. While a professor at Université Savoie Mont Blanc, he taught also at Grenoble Université and at the Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon. He was a Miller Fellow at UC Berkeley from 1987 to 1989 and then a CERN fellow in the Theory Division from 1989 to 1991.
Ivan Vorobyev is an experimental physicist currently working at CERN as a senior research fellow. Ivan is an ALICE Collaboration member since the 2012 when he did his masters at the St. Petersburg State University. Between 2014 and 2018 he has been doing his PhD at the Technical
University of Munich (TUM) studying the production of dielectron pairs in pp collisions with ALICE. From 2018 and until August 2022 Ivan has
been working as a post-doc at TUM analysing inelastic interactions of light antinuclei with the ALICE detector material and the implications
of these results for antinuclei fluxes in space. His research interests include the studies of ultra-relativistic heavy-ion collisions with
electromagnetic probes and the indirect searches for dark matter with antinuclei in space.
Collider cross talk organization committee