Speaker
Description
The measurement of low-energy cosmic anti-deuterons may reveal exotic processes such as dark-matter annihilation, since the production rate of such ions through secondary processes as the inelastic scattering of cosmic-ray protons with the interstellar medium is very low. However, the lack of experimental data at low energies hampers precise predictions of the expected anti-deuteron fluxes near Earth, where both anti-deuteron nuclear inelastic cross-section with matter and anti-deuteron production cross-section are known very poorly by today.
In ultra-relativistic collisions of protons and lead ions at the CERN's Large Hadron Collider matter and anti-matter is produced in almost equal abundances, which allows us to study the production cross-sections of (anti-)deuterons with high precision. At the same time, the absorption of produced (anti-)deuterons in the detector material itself can be studied via comparison of raw reconstructed yields of particles and anti-particles.
In this talk we present the first results on the anti-deuteron absorption cross-section in the ALICE detector material in the low momentum region using p-Pb collisions at $\sqrt{s_{\rm NN}}$ = 5.02 TeV. The reconstructed anti-deuteron to deuteron ratio is compared to the results from detailed simulations of the ALICE detector based on different versions of the GEANT toolkit for particle propagation and interaction with matter. First experimental constraints on the anti-deuteron nuclear inelastic cross-section are extracted in the momentum range between 0.3 and 4.0 GeV/$c$.
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