Observation of an anomalous positron abundance in the cosmic radiation

By O. Adriani, G. Barbarino, Galina Bazilevskaya, R. Bellotti, M. Boezio, É. Bogomolov, L. Bonechi, M. Bongi, V. Bonvicini, S. Bottai and 41 more. 2008

1,384 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Positrons are known to be produced in interactions between cosmic-ray nuclei and interstellar matter ("secondary production"). Positrons may, however, also be created by dark matter particle annihilations in the galactic halo or in the magnetospheres of near-by pulsars. The nature of dark matter is one of the most prominent open questions in science today. An observation of positrons from pulsars would open a new observation window on these sources. Here we present results from the PAMELA satellite experiment on the positron abundance in the cosmic radiation for the energy range 1.5 - 100 GeV. Our high energy data deviate significantly from predictions of secondary production models, and may constitute the first indirect evidence of dark matter particle annihilations, or the first observation of positron production from near-by pulsars. We also present evidence that solar activity significantly affects the abundance of positrons at low energies.

Subfields: Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e0a1797bde9ca1eebbaa88d9515fa15e2eb7d73d

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In Nuclear and High Energy Physics

1. R. Essig
2. P. Schuster
3. N. Toro
4. F. Ling
5. L. Honorez
6. U. Firenze
7. E. Amato
8. Gran Sasso Science Institute

Citations in the corpus

• History of dark matter (2018, neutral): “Over approximately the same period of time, great progress has also been made in the measurement of the cosmic-ray antiproton spectrum, including successive advances by the CAPRICE (Boezio et al., 1997, 2001), BESS (Asaoka et al., 2002; Abe et al., 2008), AMS-01 (Aguilar et al., 2002), and PAMELA (A”
• Cosmic ray transport in the Galaxy: A review (2017, background): “First, the spectrum of protons and helium nuclei (and possibly also of all nuclear species) seems to flatten in the energy range 200-300 GeV/n (Adriani et al., 2011b; Ahn et al., 2010; Aguilar et al., 2015a). Second, the slopes of these species are slightly different from each other. This latter eff”