Antideuterons in cosmic rays: sources and discovery potential

Understand

Antibaryons are produced in our Galaxy in collisions of high energy cosmic rays with the interstellar medium and in old supernova remnants, and possibly, in exotic sources such as primordial black hole evaporation or dark matter annihilations and decays.

• The search for signals from exotic sources in antiproton data is hampered by large backgrounds from spallation which, within theoretical errors, can solely account for the current data.
• Due to the higher energy threshold for antideuteron production, which translates into a suppression of the low energy flux from spallations, antideuteron searches have been proposed as a probe for exotic sources.
• We perform in this paper a comprehensive analysis of the antideuteron fluxes at the Earth expected from known and hypothetical sources in our Galaxy, and we calculate their maximal values consistent with current antiproton data from AMS-02.