Alternative coalescence model for deuteron, tritium, helium-3 and their antinuclei

Abstract

Antideuteron and antihelium nuclei have been proposed as a detection channel for dark matter annihilations and decays in the Milky Way, due to the low astrophysical background expected. To estimate both the signal for various dark matter models and the astrophysical background, one employs usually the coalescence model in a Monte Carlo framework. This allows one to treat the production of antinuclei on an event-by-event basis, taking thereby into account momentum correlations between the antinucleons involved in the process. This approach lacks however an underlying microscopic picture, and the numerical value of the coalescence parameter obtained from fits to different reactions varies considerably. Here we propose instead to combine event-by-event Monte Carlo simulations with a microscopic coalescence picture based on the Wigner function representations of the produced antinuclei states. This approach allows us to include in a semi-classical picture both the size of the formation region, which is process dependent, and momentum correlations. The model contains a single, universal parameter which is fixed by fitting the production spectra of antideuterons in proton-proton interactions, measured at the Large Hadron Collider. Using this value, the model describes well the production of various antinuclei both in electron-positron annihilation and in proton-proton collisions.

19 pages, 7 pdf figures; v2: minor changes, added references, accepted version

References in corpus (7)

• PYTHIA 6.4 Physics and Manual
• An Introduction to PYTHIA 8.2
• Deuteron and Anti-deuteron Production in e+e- Collisions at the Z Resonance
• General Analysis of Antideuteron Searches for Dark Matter
• Antideuterons from dark matter annihilations and hadronization model dependence
• Antideuterons in cosmic rays: sources and discovery potential
• Antideuterons from Decaying Gravitino Dark Matter

Cited by in corpus (23)

• The ALICE experiment: a journey through QCD
• Cosmic-ray Antinuclei as Messengers of New Physics: Status and Outlook for the New Decade
• Light nuclei production in relativistic heavy ion collisions from the AMPT model
• Measurement of the low-energy antideuteron inelastic cross section
• Revisiting cosmic ray antinuclei fluxes with a new coalescence model
• A realistic coalescence model for deuteron production
• Production of light (anti)nuclei in pp collisions at $\sqrt{s}=13$ TeV
• Reevaluation of the cosmic antideuteron flux from cosmic-ray interactions and from exotic sources
• On nuclear coalescence in small interacting systems
• Deuteron yields from LHC: Continuum correlations and in-medium effects
• Enhanced deuteron coalescence probability in jets
• AAfrag 2.01: Interpolation routines for Monte Carlo results on secondary production including light antinuclei in hadronic interactions
• New determination of the production cross section for $\gamma$ rays in the Galaxy
• Elliptic flow of deuterons in ultrarelativistic heavy-ion collisions
• Study of the deuterons emission time in pp collisions at the LHC via kaon-deuteron correlations
• Femtoscopic study of the proton-proton and proton-deuteron systems in heavy-ion collisions at the LHC
• Production of loosely-bound hadron molecules from bottomonium decays
• Rapidity dependence of antideuteron coalescence in pp collisions at $\sqrt{s}$ = 13 TeV with ALICE
• $\overline{\text{D}}$arkRayNet: Emulation of cosmic-ray antideuteron fluxes from dark matter
• ToMCCA: A Toy Monte Carlo Coalescence Afterburner
• New determination of the neutrino hadronic production cross sections from GeV to beyond PeV energies
• Collision system size scan for light (anti-)nuclei and (anti-)hypertriton production in high energy nuclear collisions
• Toward universal coalescence models for antideuteron production