Speaker
Description
The General Anti Particle Spectrometer (GAPS) is a balloon-borne cosmic-ray experiment
currently under construction and scheduled for a long duration balloon flight from McMurdo
Station in the Antarctic.
Its primary science goal is the search for light antinuclei in cosmic rays at kinetic energies in
below 0.25 GeV/n. This energy region is especially of interest for beyond-the-standard model
searches and is still mostly uncharted. Searches for light antimatter nucleons with energies
below ~0.25 GeV/n promise a novel approach for the search of dark matter. A large fraction of
dark matter models proposes annihilation or decay of the unknown dark matter particle with
matter/antimatter pairs in its final state. Someantiparticle searches carried out so far hit for a
possible excesss of antiparticles at low energies, however, the large uncertainties in the
astrophysical backgrounds make interpretations challenging.
GAPS promises to yield unprecedented sensitivity for the search of antideuterons and will
measure the low-energy antiproton spectrum with large statistics and high precision. To reach
the required sensitivity, the GAPS detector incorporates a new approach for antimatter
detection, utilizing a tracker with custom-designed, lithium-drifted silicon detectors, designed
to measure the X-ray cascade expected from antimatter capture, together with fast time-of-
flight system, allowing for a high precision beta measurement.
This talk will review the current progress of construction and the overall status of the
instrument, discuss the latest sensitivity estimates and present the path forward to the first
flight.
