Speaker
Description
The creation of anti-nuclei in the Galaxy has been discussed as a possible signal of exotic production mechanisms such as primordial black hole evaporation or dark matter decay/annihilation in addition to the more conventional production from cosmic-ray interactions. Tentative observations of cosmic-ray andideuteron and antihelium by the AMS-02 collaboration have re-energized the quest to use antinuclei to search for physics beyond the standard model.
In this talk, we show state-of-art predictions of the antinuclei flux from both astrophysical and standard dark matter annihilation models from combined fits to high-precision antiproton data as well as cosmic-ray nuclei measurements. Astrophysical mechanisms can explain the amount of antideuteron events detected by AMS-02, while their antihelium production lies far below the sensitivity of this experiment. In turn, standard dark matter models could potentially produce the detected antideuteron and antihelium-3 events, but the production of any detectable antihelium-4 flux would require more novel dark matter model building. As one of the few proposed ways to explain the detection of antihelium-4 events, we discuss that the annihilation/decay of a QCD-like dark sector could potentially explain the preliminary observations of AMS-02.
