Antinuclei in Heavy-Ion Collisions

Understand

We review progress in the study of antinuclei, starting from Dirac's equation and the discovery of the positron in cosmic-ray events.

• The development of proton accelerators led to the discovery of antiprotons, followed by the first antideuterons, demonstrating that antinucleons bind into antinuclei.
• With the development of heavy-ion programs at the Brookhaven AGS and CERN SPS, it was demonstrated that central collisions of heavy nuclei offer a fertile ground for research and discoveries in the area of antinuclei.
• In this review, we emphasize recent observations at Brookhaven's Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider and at CERN's Large Hadron Collider, namely, the antihypertriton and the antihelium-4, as well as measurements of the mass difference between light nuclei and antinuclei, and the interaction between antiprotons.