Speaker
Description
Antiprotons and antideuterons in cosmic rays (CRs) are studied to search for potential signals of exotic physics—such as dark matter annihilation—beyond the expected astrophysical background produced by collisions between primary CRs and the interstellar medium.
In particular, it has been argued that the production of secondary antideuterons should be suppressed at kinetic energies below a few GeV/n due to interaction kinematics. Therefore, any observation of antideuterons in that energy range would be strong evidence for new physics.
However, predictions from secondary production models are limited by current uncertainties in antiproton production cross sections, which are on the order of 10–15%. Additionally, models for antideuteron cross sections vary by an order of magnitude at kinetic energies below 10 GeV/nucleon.
In this contribution, a novel analytic model for the production cross sections of antiprotons and antideuterons, based on the latest experimental data from accelerators, will be discussed. Preliminary results for the predicted antiproton and antideuteron spectra, obtained using the cosmic ray propagation model GALPROP-HelMod with updated secondary production cross sections, will also be presented.
