Speaker
Description
Summary
The observation of anti-deuteron and anti-helium in cosmic rays has been suggested as a
smoking gun in indirect searches for Dark Matter in the Galaxy, under the hypothesis that the
background from secondary astrophysical production is negligible. Constraining predictions for
the secondary cosmic-ray flux of anti-helium and anti-deuteron with data is therefore crucial to
the experimental searches. This contribution focuses on the impact of antimatter measurements
at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) on these searches. In proton-proton, proton-nucleus and
nucleus-nucleus collisions at the TeV collision energy scale, light nuclei and their anti-matter
counterparts are produced in equal amounts for a given species. The LHC can be used as
“anti-matter factory” to measure the production of d_bar, 3He_bar and 4He_bar. In addition to providing unique
information to characterise the system produced in high-energy collisions, accelerator data on
anti-nuclei production can be used to constrain production models such as coalescence. The
most recent results on anti-nuclei production at the LHC will be presented and implications for
cosmic ray physics and indirect dark matter searches will be discussed.
