Measurement of antiproton production from antihyperon decays in pHe collisions at $\sqrt{s_{NN}}=110$ GeV

Abstract

The interpretation of cosmic antiproton flux measurements from space-borne experiments is currently limited by the knowledge of the antiproton production cross-section in collisions between primary cosmic rays and the interstellar medium. Using collisions of protons with an energy of 6.5 TeV incident on helium nuclei at rest in the proximity of the interaction region of the LHCb experiment, the ratio of antiprotons originating from antihyperon decays to prompt production is measured for antiproton momenta between 12 and 110 GeV/c. The dominant antihyperon contribution, namely $\bar{\Lambda }\to \bar{p}{\pi }^{+}$ decays from promptly produced $\bar{\Lambda }$ particles, is also exclusively measured. The results complement the measurement of prompt antiproton production obtained from the same data sample. At the energy scale of this measurement, the antihyperon contributions to antiproton production are observed to be significantly larger than predictions of commonly used hadronic production models.

26 pages, 17 figures. All figures and tables, along with any supplementary material and additional information, are available at https://cern.ch/lhcbproject/Publications/p/LHCb-PAPER-2022-006.html (LHCb public pages)

References in corpus (8)

• PYTHIA 6.4 Physics and Manual
• A new measurement of the antiproton-to-proton flux ratio up to 100 GeV in the cosmic radiation
• Performance of the LHCb Vertex Locator
• Measurements of Strange Particle Production in $p+p$ Collisions at $\sqrt{s}$= 200 GeV
• Scrutinizing the evidence for dark matter in cosmic-ray antiprotons
• Cosmic Ray Antiprotons at High Energies
• Fragmentation fractions of c and b quarks into charmed hadrons at LEP
• A Neural-Network-defined Gaussian Mixture Model for particle identification applied to the LHCb fixed-target programme

Cited by in corpus (3)

• High-density gas target at the LHCb experiment
• Stellar isotropic model in the symmetric teleparallel equivalent of general relativity theory
• The impact of future $D$- and $B$-meson measurements with the SMOG2 program at LHCb on the determination of nuclear parton distribution functions