A statistical procedure for the identification of positrons in the PAMELA experiment

By O. Adriani, B. G.C, B. G.A., R. Bellotti, M. Boezio, B. E.A., L. Bonechi, M. Bongi, V. Bonvicini, S. Borisov and 51 more. 2010

147 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The PAMELA satellite experiment has measured the cosmic-ray positron fraction between 1.5 GeV and 100 GeV. The need to reliably discriminate between the positron signal and proton background has required the development of an ad hoc analysis procedure. In this paper, a method for positron identification is described and its stability and capability to yield a correct background estimate is shown. The analysis includes new experimental data, the application of three different fitting techniques for the background sample and an estimate of systematic uncertainties due to possible inaccuracies in the background selection. The new experimental results confirm both solar modulation effects on cosmic-rays with low rigidities and an anomalous positron abundance above 10 GeV.

Subfields: Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e125609203a1205f31a7570ad52ce4af7df4a87e

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In Nuclear and High Energy Physics

1. Marco Cirelli
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Citations in the corpus

• AMS-02 antiprotons, at last! Secondary astrophysical component and immediate implications for Dark Matter (2015, background): “The spectra are measured up to a rigidity of 1.8 and 3 TV for p and α nuclei, respectively, and, as already reported by the Pamela Collaboration [29], they cannot be described by a single power law: a hardening at energies higher than ∼300 GV is observed for both.”
• Astrophysical models for the origin of the positron (2011, background): “Since then, the collaboration has extensively argued (see [4]) that their rejection power—both based on test beam data and on in-flight data—can be estimated at the 10 −5 level or lower, thus strongly disfavouring proton contamination as a plausible cause.”