Measurement of anti-3He nuclei absorption in matter and impact on their propagation in the Galaxy
ALICE Collaboration
(2023) Nature Physics, volume 19, issue 1, pp. 61 - 71
(Article)
Abstract
In our Galaxy, light antinuclei composed of antiprotons and antineutrons can be produced through high-energy cosmic-ray collisions with the interstellar medium or could also originate from the annihilation of dark-matter particles that have not yet been discovered. On Earth, the only way to produce and study antinuclei with high precision
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is to create them at high-energy particle accelerators. Although the properties of elementary antiparticles have been studied in detail, the knowledge of the interaction of light antinuclei with matter is limited. We determine the disappearance probability of 3He ¯ when it encounters matter particles and annihilates or disintegrates within the ALICE detector at the Large Hadron Collider. We extract the inelastic interaction cross section, which is then used as an input to the calculations of the transparency of our Galaxy to the propagation of 3He ¯ stemming from dark-matter annihilation and cosmic-ray interactions within the interstellar medium. For a specific dark-matter profile, we estimate a transparency of about 50%, whereas it varies with increasing 3He ¯ momentum from 25% to 90% for cosmic-ray sources. The results indicate that 3He ¯ nuclei can travel long distances in the Galaxy, and can be used to study cosmic-ray interactions and dark-matter annihilation.
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Keywords: General Physics and Astronomy
ISSN: 1745-2473
Publisher: Nature Publishing Group SN -
Note: Funding Information: We thank A. Strong for his guidance in the implementation of the antinuclei propagation within the GALPROP code, A. Shukla and P. von Doetinchem for providing the production cross sections in cosmic-ray collisions with interstellar medium, and J. Herms and A. Ibarra for model calculations of the spectra stemming from DM annihilation. We would like to thank all the engineers and technicians for their invaluable contributions to the construction of the experiment and the CERN accelerator teams for the outstanding performance of the LHC complex. We gratefully acknowledge the resources and support provided by all the grid centres and the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid (WLCG) collaboration. We acknowledge the following funding agencies for their support in building and running the ALICE detector: A. I. Alikhanyan National Science Laboratory (Yerevan Physics Institute) Foundation (ANSL), State Committee of Science and World Federation of Scientists (WFS), Armenia; Austrian Academy of Sciences, Austrian Science Fund (FWF): (M 2467-N36) and Nationalstiftung für Forschung, Technologie und Entwicklung, Austria; Ministry of Communications and High Technologies, National Nuclear Research Center, Azerbaijan; Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico (CNPq), Financiadora de Estudos e Projetos (Finep), Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo (FAPESP), and Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS), Brazil; Ministry of Education of China (MOEC), Ministry of Science & Technology of China (MSTC) and National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC), China; Ministry of Science and Education and Croatian Science Foundation, Croatia; Centro de Aplicaciones Tecnológicas y Desarrollo Nuclear (CEADEN), Cubaenergía, Cuba; Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports of the Czech Republic, Czech Republic; The Danish Council for Independent Research—Natural Sciences, the Villum Fonden, and Danish National Research Foundation (DNRF), Denmark; Helsinki Institute of Physics (HIP), Finland; Commissariat à l’Energie Atomique (CEA), Institut National de Physique Nucléaire et de Physique des Particules (IN2P3), and Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), France; Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung (BMBF) and GSI Helmholtzzentrum für Schwerionenforschung GmbH, Germany; General Secretariat for Research and Technology, Ministry of Education, Research and Religions, Greece; National Research, Development and Innovation Office, Hungary; Department of Atomic Energy Government of India (DAE), Department of Science and Technology, Government of India (DST), University Grants Commission, Government of India (UGC), and Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), India; Indonesian Institute of Science, Indonesia; Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare (INFN), Italy; Japanese Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT) and Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) KAKENHI, Japan; Consejo Nacional de Ciencia (CONACYT) y Tecnología, through Fondo de Cooperación Internacional en Ciencia y Tecnología (FONCICYT) and Dirección General de Asuntos del Personal Academico (DGAPA), Mexico; Nederlandse Organisatie voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek (NWO), Netherlands; The Research Council of Norway, Norway; Commission on Science and Technology for Sustainable Development in the South (COMSATS), Pakistan; Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, Peru; Ministry of Education and Science, National Science Centre and WUT ID-UB, Poland; Korea Institute of Science and Technology Information and National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF), Republic of Korea; Ministry of Education and Scientific Research, Institute of Atomic Physics, Ministry of Research and Innovation and Institute of Atomic Physics, and University Politehnica of Bucharest, Romania; Joint Institute for Nuclear Research (JINR), Ministry of Education and Science of the Russian Federation, National Research Centre Kurchatov Institute, Russian Science Foundation and Russian Foundation for Basic Research, Russia; Ministry of Education, Science, Research and Sport of the Slovak Republic, Slovakia; National Research Foundation of South Africa, South Africa; Swedish Research Council (VR) and Knut & Alice Wallenberg Foundation (KAW), Sweden; European Organization for Nuclear Research, Switzerland; Suranaree University of Technology (SUT), National Science and Technology Development Agency (NSDTA), Suranaree University of Technology (SUT), Thailand Science Research and Innovation (TSRI), and National Science, Research and Innovation Fund (NSRF), Thailand; Turkish Energy, Nuclear and Mineral Research Agency (TENMAK), Turkey; National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, Ukraine; Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC), UK; National Science Foundation of the United States of America (NSF) and United States Department of Energy, Office of Nuclear Physics (DOE NP), USA. In addition, individual groups and members have received support from the German Research Foundation (DFG), Germany. The copyright of this Article is held by CERN, for the benefit of the ALICE Collaboration. Publisher Copyright: © 2022, CERN.
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