The Cosmic‐Ray Antiproton Flux between 3 and 49 GeV

Abstract

Recently the AMS-02 collaboration has published the measurement of the cosmic antiproton to proton ratio ¯ p/p and the ¯ p flux with a high precision up to ∼ 450 GeV. In this work, we perform a systematic analysis of the secondary antiproton flux generated by the cosmic ray interaction with the interstellar gas. The uncertainty of the prediction originates from the cosmic ray propagation process and the hadronic interaction models. Although the cosmic ray propagation parameters have been well controlled by the AMS-02 B/C ratio data for a specified model, different propagation models can not be discriminated by the B/C data. The ¯ p flux is also calculated for several hadronic interaction models, which are generally adopted by the cosmic ray community. However, the results for different hadronic models do not converge. We find the EPOS LHC model, which seems to fit the collider data very well, predicts a slightly lower ¯ p/p ratio than the AMS-02 data at the high energy end. Finally we derive the constraints on the dark matter annihilation cross section from the AMS-02 ¯ p/p ratio for different propagation and hadronic interaction models. PACS numbers: 96.50.S-,95.35.+d

Uncertainties in Dark Matter Indirect Detection

“…One requires a large number of measurements with good statistics over a large energy range to produce detailed anti-proton spectra for study. Anti-proton spectra obtained from previous balloon borne experiments such as CAPRISE98 [3] and HEAT [48] had very low statistics, but recently the PAMELA satellite experiment [33] released a high-quality measurement of the anti-proton/proton flux ratio for an energy range of 1-100 GeV. This spectrum confirmed the behaviour of the anti-proton/proton ratio as observed by previous experiments.…”

Indirect signals from light neutralinos in supersymmetric models without gaugino mass unification

“…[51], to which we refer for details. Here we only emphasize the main results obtained in that work: i) The antiproton flux has been evaluated consistently by employing the propagation parameters as derived from a full and systematic analysis on stable nuclei [48]; ii) This secondary antiproton flux is in very good agreement with the data taken from the experiments bess [54,55], ams [56], caprice [57] (see Fig. 14 in Ref.…”

Measurement of the shadowing of high-energy cosmic rays by the Moon: A search for TeV-energy antiprotons

“…Data are obtained by balloon-borne experiments and, recently, satellite experiments. The CAPRICE [10] and HEAT [11] collaborations obtained ratios measured between 4 and 50 GeV with a series of balloon flights. The CAPRICE data do not show any flattening of the ratio with increasing energy (ratio $ 10 À3 around 40 GeV) as expected from the secondary production model, in contrast with the last HEAT data point, which sets a limit of $2 · 10 À4 above 20 GeV.…”