Antihelium-3 fluxes near Earth using data-driven estimates for annihilation cross section

Abstract

Antinuclei found in cosmic rays could provide a smoking gun signal for dark matter as this signal is virtually background free. The study of 3He cosmic rays requires the knowledge of their production, propagation in the galaxy and annihilation cross-section. While the former two have been already estimated with data-driven methods, there were no experimental data available for the 3He inelastic cross section. We measured for the first time the inelastic cross section of 3He using the ALICE detector itself as a target. To study the effect of 3He annihilation in the galaxy and estimate the transparency of the galaxy, the 3He source functions and annihilation cross sections were implemented in GALPROP.