Abstract
The AMS-02 experiment is measuring the cosmic ray antiproton flux with high precision. The interpretation of the upcoming data requires a thorough understanding of the secondary antiproton background. In this work, we employ newly available data of the NA49 experiment at CERN, in order to recalculate the antiproton source term arising from cosmic ray spallations on the interstellar matter. We systematically account for the production of antiprotons via hyperon decay and discuss the possible impact of isospin effects on antineutron production. A detailed comparison of our calculation with the existing literature as well as with Monte Carlo based evaluations of the antiproton source term is provided. Our most important result is an updated prediction for the secondary antiproton flux which includes a realistic assessment of the particle physics uncertainties at all energies.
Highlights
ArXiv:1408.0299v1 [hep-ph] 1 Aug 2014 parameterizations [2, 3] are mainly based on experimental data from the 1970s and early 80s
We investigate the possible impact of isospin effects on the antiproton source term
We have rederived the secondary antiproton source term which arises from cosmic ray spallations in the galactic disc
Summary
The dominant contribution to the antiproton source term arises from the scattering of cosmic ray protons with hydrogen in the galactic disc. The fraction of escaping antiprotons depends on the boost of the parent hyperons and details of the detector setup It varies between different regions of the phase space and between different experiments. While the experiment was completed already in 2002, data on antiproton production were published only recently [4] They provide a high phasespace coverage and drastically exceed the precision of previous data sets. The collaboration has introduced a simple empirical model which relates the antiproton cross section in proton nucleus scattering with the cross section in proton proton scattering This model was shown to describe pC scattering with good precision over the whole phase space and shall be used for pHe and HeHe scattering in this work
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