On the possibility to study antiproton production at the SPD detector at NICA collider for dark matter search in astrophysical experiments

Abstract

Dark matter is an important component of the Standard model of cosmology but its nature is still unknown. One of the most common explanations is that dark matter consists of Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs), supposed to be cold thermal relics of the Big Bang and to build up the galactic dark halos. Indirect search of dark matter could be performed via the study of an anomalous antiproton component in cosmic rays originating from possible annihilation of dark matter pairs in the galactic halo, on top of the standard astrophysical production. The measurements performed by the AMS-02 and PAMELA spectrometers have shown that limited knowledge of antiproton-production cross sections in $pp$, $pD$, $pHe$ and $HeHe$ collisions is one of the main uncertainties of background subtraction. The planned SPD experiment at the NICA collider could provide a precision measurement of antiproton yield in wide kinematic range in $pp$ and $pD$ collisions at the energy scale from the threshold to $\sqrt{s}=26$ GeV/$c$.

References in corpus (6)

• Measurements of ${\pi }^{\pm }$, K${}^{\pm }$, p and $\bar{\text{p}}$ spectra in proton-proton interactions at 20, 31, 40, 80 and 158 GeV/c with the NA61/SHINE spectrometer at the CERN SPS
• A new evaluation of the antiproton production cross section for cosmic ray studies
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• Production of Mesons and Baryons at High Rapidity and High Pt in Proton-Proton Collisions at sqrt(s) = 200 GeV
• Spin Physics Experiments at NICA-SPD with polarized proton and deuteron beams
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Cited by in corpus (2)

• Possible studies at the first stage of the NICA collider operation with polarized and unpolarized proton and deuteron beams
• On the study of antiprotons yield in hadronic collisions at NICA SPD