Antimatter Cosmic Rays

P. Chardonnet , P. Salati and R. Taillet. September 21, 1998

Laboratoire Ancilevien de Physique Theorique LAPTH, BP110, F{74941 Annecy{le{Vieux Cedex, France.

1 - Introduction.
Ties are strong between high-energy astrophysics and particle physics. There is actually an historic relationship between these two elds. In its infancy, particle physics started as a hunt for cosmic rays penetrating into the atmosphere. It brought to the community important discoveries. The rst identi cation of positrons by Carl D. Anderson in 1932 1] gave a very strong support to the Dirac Theory. The muon has also been found to be an important component of the showers that are generated by high-energy particles impacting on the top of the atmosphere. Before trying to synthetize the various species of the subnuclear realm, particle physicists have actually used what outer space provided them. The study of antimatter in the cosmic radiation has been recently revived. Balloon 2] and satellite 3] borne detectors are about to reach an unprecedented accuracy. The 4 He=4 He ratio has been lowered down to 10;6 and should be pushed down by two orders of magnitude in the near future. This eld has profound connections with cosmology. To commence, it is related to the distribution of baryons in the universe. Is matter baryon symmetric ? In other words, are there islands of antimatter oating around us ? A few theoretical arguments are in disfavour of that idea. Strong -ray emission regions should in principle lie at the border separating matter from antimatter domains. No such region has yet been observed, implying that antimatter is far away. Antimatter islands should actually be separated from us by more than 100 Mpc. They may even be outside the cosmological horizon 4]. Then, the segregation of antimatter from matter, a process which must have taken place in the early universe, is not understood. Finally, grand uni ed theories, the violation of the R-parity in supersymmetry or sphallerons provide three di erent mechanisms to generate a baryon asymmetry. However, one should not subscribe to any dogmatic point of view. The discovery of a single anti-carbon nucleus would inevitably
E{mail: chardon@lapp.in2p3.fr, salati@lapp.in2p3.fr and taillet@lapp.in2p3.fr

invalidate the above-mentionned line of reasoning. The search of antimatter in cosmic rays is also related to the possible existence of primordial black holes (PBH), remnants of a primeval phase transition. If such black holes were present in our galaxy, their evaporation would generate a ux of antiprotons, potentially detectable at low energy. Finally, antiprotons would also be produced in the annihilation of neutralinos, a weakly interacting massive species that has been postulated as the major part of the galactic dark matter. These particles have been predicted by supersymmetry, an extension of the standard model of particle physics. They are processed during the big bang in just the right amount to account for the astronomical missing mass. If present in the halo of our galaxy, they would still marginally annihilate with each other and produce in particular antiprotons. The presence of an anomalous abundance of antimatter in cosmic rays would therefore be the signal for new physics, implying either a baryon symmetric universe or the existence of PBH's or neutralinos in our vicinity. As a matter of fact, antimatter is naturally produced as secondary species resulting from the impact, or spallation, of cosmic ray primaries on the interstellar gas. In section 2, we review the salient features of a di usion model that accounts for the conventional production and propagation throughout the galaxy of secondary antiprotons. In section 3, we concentrate on the additional antiproton signal produced by neutralinos annihilating in the galactic halo. In section 4, we discuss the production of secondary antimatter nuclei. We show that the heavier the nucleus, the lower its abundance in cosmic rays. We derive in particular the astrophysical ux of anti-deutons and show that it lies within reach of the near future experiments.

2 The production and propagation of secondary antiprotrons.

Antiprotons are naturally produced by the nuclear interactions of cosmic ray particles with the interstellar medium. Since both cosmic rays and the interstellar medium are mostly composed of protons, the fundamental process is the collision or spallation of a high-energy proton with a proton at rest in the interstellar medium. This reaction produces hadrons, mostly pions whose radiative decays are the principal source of the galactic di use gamma-ray emission. During the fragmentation process, when the inelastic collision produces coloured strings, resonances such as 0, ; , ;; or ; are formed and subsequently decay into antiprotons and antineutrons, the latter decaying in turn into antiprotons. The threshold for the antiproton production mechanism p + p ! 3p + p is 7 GeV. The antiproton multiplicity per collision is de ned as
p Yp(Ep ! Ep) = dN dEp

(1)

where Ep stands for the energy of the incoming cosmic ray proton while Ep denotes the energy of the resulting antiproton. That multiplicity obtains from the appropriate integral over phase space of the Lorentz invariant antiproton production cross section Ep d3 =d3Pp as parametrized by Tan and Ng 5]. 2

As suggested by Parker, the propagation of cosmic rays inside the galaxy is strongly a ected by their scattering on the irregularities of magnetic elds. This results into a di usive transport. In the following, we will assume an isotropic di usion with an empirical value for the di usion coe cient. A valuable hint for the existence of a di usion region in our galaxy is provided by the recent di use -ray observations 6, 7], which point towards the presence of cosmic rays far above the galactic disk. Our galaxy can be reasonably modelled by a thin disk of atomic and molecular hydrogen with 0 r R = 20 kpc and jz j h = 100 pc, associated to an extended region of di usion containing irregular magnetic elds with the same radial extension and jz j L = 3 kpc. Those various regions are superimposed to the spheroidal halo of dark matter whose density pro le will be given in the next section. That two-zone di usion model is in good agreement with the observed primary and secondary nuclei abundances 8]. Since their discovery by Golden in 1979 9], cosmic antiprotons have been thoroughly studied in the framework of the leaky box model 10]. We analyse here their propagation throughout the galaxy in the light of a two-zone di usion model 11, 12]. In a stationary regime, the propagation equation of cosmic antiprotons may be expressed as

@np = 0 = K n ; ; n + q (2) p p p p @t where np (Ep r z ) is the density of antiprotons with energy Ep at location (r z ). In the righthand side of relation (2), the rst term describes the di usion of antiprotons. The di usion coe cient K is constant at low energy, but raises with the rigidity p of the particle beyond a critical value of 1 GV. This behaviour can be modelled by the form

p K = 6 1023 m2s;1 1 + 1 GV

0:6

(3)

The second term in Eq.(2) describes the destruction of antiprotons by their interactions with the interstellar medium. That destruction rate is shown to be very small but has not been neglected in what follows. The collision rate of antiprotons with the interstellar hydrogen is given by ;p =
pH

vp nH

(4)

where p H is the total antiproton interaction cross section with protons, vp denotes the velocity and nH = 1 cm;3 is the average hydrogen density in the thin matter disk. The last term in relation (2) deals with the various sources of antiprotons. Those species are produced by the spallation of cosmic protons on the interstellar matter of the disk. The antiproton production rate involves a convolution over the incident cosmic proton energy spectrum dnp=dEp ( ) Z +1 dn p st qp (Ep) = dEp (Ep) ;p (Ep) Yp (Ep ! Ep ) : (5)

Ep

dEp

The collision rate ;p of protons with the interstellar gas is de ned in just the same way as the collision rate ;p of antiprotons in relation (4). The antiproton di erential spectrum Yp produced during a single proton spallation was previously de ned in Eq.(1). 3

We have solved Eq.(2) following the analysis by Webber, Lee and Gupta 8]. At the edge of the domain where cosmic rays are con ned, the particles escape freely and the di usion becomes ine cient. Thus the density vanishes at the boundaries of the domain where cosmic rays are con ned by di usion. This provides the initial conditions for solving the di usion equation. Then, because the problem has a cylindrical symmetry, the densities np and np may be expanded as a series of the Bessel functions of zeroth order J0 ( i x) where i is the ith zero of J0 and where x = r=R. Details may be found in 11, 12]. The cosmic ray sources are located in the thin gaseous disk and we have taken the radial distribution of supernovae remnants and pulsars measured by Lyne et al. 13]. As regards the spallation mechanism, su ce it to say that an e ective antiproton multiplicity may be de ned as ) ( Z +1 p(Ep) e Yp(Ep ! Ep) (6) Yp (Ep) = dEp Ep p(Ep) so that no convolution with the cosmic proton energy spectrum is needed any longer. The di erential ux of protons of energy Ep is denoted here by p(Ep). The resulting secondary antiproton ux is featured 12] by the dashed line in gure 1 where di erent top of the atmosphere (TOA) uxes are plotted as a function of the antiproton kinetic energy. It may be compared to the BESS95 data 2] as shown by the crosses. There seems to be a small excess at low energy, precisely the region where an exotic signal may show up. However, note that the data points are well tted by the secondary ux alone, with a reduced 2 of 0.83.

3 Antiprotons from neutralino annihilations.

The dark matter halo that makes up the most massive (yet invisible) component of our galaxy could be made of neutralinos. These are particles predicted by supersymmetry, an extension of the Standard Model of particle physics. The possibility to detect the presence of neutralinos in our galactic halo has been extensively studied in many di erent ways 14]. When neutralinos encounter in the galaxy, they annihilate into antiprotons, among other products. These extra antiprotons would contribute to those already observed in cosmic rays, thus giving rise to an experimental deviation to the spectrum computed above. The di erential rate (per unit volume and per second) for the production of antiprotons from { annihilations is given by ( )2 susy qp (Ep) = h v i f (Ep) m (7) in which h v i is the { annihilation cross section averaged over the relative velocities of the reacting neutralinos. For a single annihilation, the antiproton energy spectrum is f! X (F ) dNp 1 d ( ! p + X ) f (Ep) B f dE = (8) dE
p

Ff

Figure 1: TOA antiproton uxes versus the antiproton kinetic energy 12]. The BESS95 data 2] are shown by crosses. The dashed line denotes the secondary ux produced by spallation, the dotted one features the primary ux due to neutralino annihilation in the halo for a neutralino con guration with m = 62 GeV, P = 0:98 and h2 = 0:11. The solid line denotes the calculated total ux.

) where F describes the { annihilation nal state and B (F f is the branching ratio into the quarks or gluons f in the channel F . The di erential distribution of the antiprotons generated by the hadronization of quarks (with the exception of the top quark) and of gluons is denoted by f =dE and depends on the nature of the species f . Of the various quantities that are present dNp p in Eq.(7), h v i and f (Ep) depend on the neutralino properties. The antiproton production rate also depends on the distribution of the dark matter particles inside the galactic halo. At this stage, some comments are in order : (i) The neutralino annihilation cross section h v i is evaluated as in Ref. 11, 12]. The minimal supersymmetric standard model is de ned at the electroweak scale as a straightforward supersymmetric extension of the Standard Model. The Higgs sector consists of two Higgs doublets H1 and H2, which de ne two free parameters : the ratio of the two vacuum expectation values tan hH2i=hH1i and the mass mA of the neutral pseudoscalar Higgs. The other parameters of the model are contained in the superpotential, which includes all the Yukawa couplings and the Higgs{mixing term H1H2 , and in the soft{breaking Lagrangian, which includes the trilinear and bilinear breaking parameters and the soft gaugino and scalar mass terms. For details, we refer the reader to the above cited analysis. The parameter P describes the nature of the neutralino. The closer to unity, the more gaugino like. (iii) The neutralino halo distribution is taken to be spherically symmetric. In the axisymmetric coordinate system r and z , the density pro le is given by ( 2 2 ) a +r (r z ) = ( ) a2 + r2 + z 2 (9)

where a = 3:5 kpc is the core radius of the dark matter halo. The supersymmetric source term for antiprotons is then plugged in the di usion model described in the previous section. The resulting supersymmetric antiproton ux in cosmic rays corresponds to the dotted curve of gure 1. A speci c choice of supersymmetric parameters has been assumed here. It corresponds to a neutralino with a mass m = 62 GeV that contributes a cosmological relic density of h2 = 0:11. That species is mostly a gaugino with P = 0:98, 0 i.e., in that case the supersymmetric Majorana fermion associated to the photon and the Z boson. The solid line corresponds to the total ux that takes into account both the spallation secondary antiprotons and the supersymmetric antiprotons. Because the latter are produced at rest in the annihilation of a neutralino pair, its low-energy spectrum tends to be at and exceeds the spallation signal.

4 Production of antinuclei from spallation

The amount of antimatter in cosmic rays is about to be measured with unequalled accuracy by the balloon borne experiment BESS 2] and by the space shuttle borne spectrometer of the AMS 6

collaboration 3]. One of the most exciting goals of the experiment is the possible detection of antinuclei in the cosmic radiation. It is generally believed that the observation of a single antihelium or anti-carbon would undoubtedly signal the presence of stars made of antimatter. Such a discovery would be of paramount importance as regards the existence of a baryon symmetry in the universe and has therefore strong cosmological implications as already mentionned in section 1. That is why it is crucial to ascertain that cosmic rays do not already contain detectable traces of antinuclei which could have been directly manufactured in our galaxy, along with antiprotons. In this section, we focus on the abundance of anti-deuterium D and anti-helium 3 He produced through the interaction of high-energy protons with the interstellar hydrogen. That calculation requires two ingredients. First, we need to evaluate the production cross section of antinuclei during the interaction of a high-energy proton with a proton at rest. Antideuterons are formed by the fusion of an antiproton and antineutron pair, while anti-helium 3He is predominently formed through the production of anti-tritium T which subsequently decays into 3 He. We have used here a factorization scheme together with a coalescence model 15] which we discuss below. Our estimates of the probability for anti-deuterium production are in fairly good agreement with the accelerator data collected at Serpukhov and at the ISR 16, 17, 18]. Then, the propagation of these antinuclei throughout the galaxy is treated in just the same way as for the antiprotons above. We have evaluated the Lorentz-invariant cross section for the production of an antinucleus during the interaction between two protons. We rst note that the invariant cross section for the production of antiprotons is experimentally well known. As discussed in section 2, it is well tted by the Tan and Ng's parametrization 5] which we have used thoughout this analysis. Assuming that the invariance of isospin holds, the antineutron production cross section is equal to its antiproton counterpart. The calculation of the probability for the formation of an antinucleus can now be performed in two steps. We rst need to estimate the probability for the creation of a group of antinucleons. Then, those antinucleons fuse together to yield an antinucleus. Let us concentrate on the case of anti-deuterons which requires the formation of both an antiproton and an antineutron. We have assumed that factorization holds at this stage. This means that the production of two antinucleons is proportionnal to the square of the production of one of them, a hypothesis which is reasonably well established at high energies. However, at lower energies, factorization has to break down, if only to respect the kinematic constraints that thresholds are di erent. We propose to take this into account by assuming in addition that the center of mass energy available for the production of the second antinucleon is reduced by twice the energy p ~ k ~ carried away by the rst antinucleon : if we note Fp n( s k p n) the probability of forming a p ~p and k ~n, we have pair with a center-of-mass energy s, with the impulsions k ~p k ~n) = 1 Fp(ps k ~p) Fn(ps ; 2Ep k ~n) + k ~p $ k ~n : Fp n(ps k (10) 2 This probability has the merit of vanishing at the physical threshold. However, it introduces the 7

arbitrary Ansatz that the rst pair is produced back to back in the center of mass frame of the proton-proton collision. To test how crucial this assumption really is in the nal results, we also used a second possible Ansatz, where the nucleon associated to the rst antinucleon is produced p p at rest. This simply amounts to replace s ; 2Ep by s ; mp ; Ep in the previous formula. Both Ansaetze give similar results. In the plateau regime where the antinuclei abundances are fairly independant of the energy, the relative di erence between the two assumptions does not exceed 4%. Once the antiproton and the antineutron are formed, they combine together to give an anti-deuteron with probability Z p 3~ ~ ~p d3k ~n C (k ~p k ~n) Fp n ps k ~p k ~n : (11) FD( s kD) d kD = d3k The summation is performed on those anti-nucleon con gurations for which

~p + k ~n = k~D : k

(12)

~p k ~n) describes the probability for a p ; n pair to yield an antiThe coalescence function C (k ~p ; k ~n = 2 ~ between the deuteron by fusion. That function depends actually on the di erence k antinucleon momenta. Notice that the formation of the antinucleon pair is implicitly assumed to be independent of the later coalescence process where the anti-nucleons melt together to form the anti-deuteron 19]. This is well justi ed by the large di erence between the binding and pair creation energies. As a matter of fact, an energy of 3:7 GeV is required to form an antideuteron whereas the binding energy of the latter is B 2:2 MeV. The coalescence function is therefore strongly peaked around ~ = ~ 0 and expression (11) simpli es into ! Z ~ ~ p p k k ~D) ' ~p = D k ~ = D FD( s k d3 ~ C ( ~ ) Fp n s k (13) 2 n 2 where the probability for the formation of the p ; n pair has been factored out. From the term in brackets, we build a Lorentz-invariant quantity which we evaluate this time in the rest frame of the anti-deuteron ! Z E m 4 P3 3~ D D ~) ' d C ( (14) Ep En mp mn 3 coal : In that frame, the antinucleons merge together if the momentum of the corresponding two-body reduced system is less than some critical value Pcoal. That coalescence momentum is the only free parameter of our factorization and coalescence model. p Theoretical values for Pcoal range from mp B 46 MeV, naively derived from the antideuteron binding energy, up to 180 Mev as would follow from a Hulthen parametrization of the deuterium wave function 20]. Comparing the predictions of our simple model with the Lorentz invariant anti-deuteron production cross sections as measured experimentally 16, 17, 18], we have deduced a value of Pcoal 58 MeV (see 15] for the details and a discussion), in good agreement with the value derived from the anti-deuteron binding energy.
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The anti-helium 3He nucleus may be formed directly by the fusion of two antiprotons and an antineutron. A second possibility is the synthesis of anti-tritium T which subsequently decays into 3 He with a half-lifetime of 12:3 years. This second mechanism is dominant. It does not su er from the electromagnetic suppression due to the Coulomb repulsion between the two antiprotons. We have therefore ignored here the direct 3 He fusion and have concentrated instead on the production of T. The corresponding production cross section may be obtained from the direct generalization of the anti-deuteron calculations.

0.0001

1e-05

1e-06

pbar/p dbar/p * 1e4 (ansatz 1) dbar/p * 1e4 (ansatz 2) he3bar/p * 1e8 (ansatz 1) he3bar/p * 1e8 (ansatz 2)

1e-07

1e-08 1 10 Momentum per nucleon [GeV]

Figure 2: The uxes of cosmic ray antiprotons and of anti-deuterium and anti-tritium nuclei, relative to the proton ux, are presented as a function of the momentum per nucleon 15]. To t on the same diagram, the curves have been scaled by a factor of 104 for anti-deuterium and of 108 for anti-helium 3 He. The doubling of curves corresponds to di erent factorization schemes as explained in the text. The quantitative results for the expected antinuclei uxes in cosmic rays are shown in gure 2. We nd that the D=p ratio exceeds 10;9 above a momentum per antinucleon of 4 GeV/c. Would the universe be purely made of matter, the AMS collaboration should still be able to detect a few anti-deuterons during the space station stage of the experiment. However, the 3 He=p abundance does not exceed 4 10;13. Heavier anti-nuclei are even further suppressed 9

as a result of a decreasing probability to merge successfully several antinucleons into heavier systems.

5 - Conclusion.
Searches for antimatter in the cosmic radiation are strongly connected to crucial cosmological issues. The discovery of a single anti-helium or anti-carbon nucleus would be a smoking gun for the existence of antimatter domains in the universe. An excess at low energy in the antiproton ux would also be the signal for the presence of neutralinos or PBH's in the galactic halo. It is therefore of paramount importance to ascertain that the production and propagation of secondary antiprotons is well understood. A few problems are not yet completely solved. Is solar modulation well accounted for ? How do energy losses a ect the antiproton spectrum below 1 GV ? Is there a signi cant amount of di usive reacceleration ? New measurements are mandatory at this stage. The forthcoming experiments should actually clarify these matters.

References

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