PAMELA: A payload for antimatter matter exploration and light-nuclei astrophysics - status and first results

By M. Pearce, O. Adriani, M. Ambriola, G. Barbarino, A. Basili, G. Bazilevskaja, R. Bellotti, M. Boezio, É. Bogomolov, L. Bonechi and 50 more. IEEE Nuclear Science Symposium Conference Record, 2006

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PAMELA is a satellite-borne experiment designed for precision studies of the charged cosmic radiation. The primary scientific goal is the study of the antimatter component of the cosmic radiation (antiprotons, 80 MeV - 190 GeV; and positrons, 50 MeV - 270 GeV) in order to search for evidence of dark matter particle annihilations. PAMELA will also search for primordial antinuclei (in particular, anti-helium), and test cosmic-ray propagation models through precise measurements of the antiparticle energy spectrum and studies of light nuclei and their isotopes. Concomitant goals include a study of solar physics and solar modulation during the 24th solar minimum by investigating low energy particles in the cosmic radiation; and a reconstruction of the cosmic ray electron energy spectrum up to several TeV thereby allowing a possible contribution from local sources to be studied. PAMELA is housed on-board the Russian Resurs-DKl satellite, which was launched on June 15th 2006 in an elliptical (350-600 km altitude) orbit with an inclination of 70 degrees. PAMELA consists of a permanent magnet spectrometer, to provide rigidity and charge sign information; a Time-of-Flight and trigger system, for velocity and charge determination; a silicon-tungsten calorimeter, for lepton/hadron discrimination; and a neutron detector. An anticoincidence system is used offline to reject false triggers. In this article the PAMELA experiment and its status are reviewed. A preliminary discussion of data recorded in-orbit is also presented.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

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Citations in the corpus

Galactic secondary positron flux at the Earth (2008, methodology): “The PAMELA experiment (Picozza et al. 2007) has released its first results on the positron fraction for energies ranging from 1.5 GeV to 100 GeV and with a large statistics (Adriani et al. 2008).”
Background model systematics for the Fermi GeV excess (2014, background): “The definition of the point source (PSC) mask weights wi,j ∈ [0, 1], as well as of the external constraints χext, will be discussed below.”
New gamma-ray contributions to supersymmetric dark matter annihilation (2007, neutral): “For indirect detection, the satellite PAMELA [5] was launched a year ago and will soon reveal its first sets of data for positron and antiproton yields in the cosmic rays [6].”
THE LARGE AREA TELESCOPE ON THE FERMI GAMMA-RAY SPACE TELESCOPE MISSION (2009, background): “These fluxes will be updated with results from the Pamela satellite (Picozza et al. 2007).”
WIMP dark matter candidates and searches—current status and future prospects (2017, neutral): “Searches for charged cosmic rays employ several detection techniques including balloon-type (e.g. HEAT [371], ATIC [372]) and groundbased telescopes (e.g. Pierre Auger Observatory [373], the telescope array [374]), as well as satellite-based experiments including, e.g. PAMELA [375], AMS-02 [376], Fe”
Observation of an anomalous positron abundance in the cosmic radiation (2008, background): “The PAMELA[25] apparatus is a system of electronic particle detectors optimised for the study of antiparticles in the cosmic radiation.”
TIME DEPENDENCE OF THE e− FLUX MEASURED BY PAMELA DURING THE 2006 JULY–2009 DECEMBER SOLAR MINIMUM (2013, background): “A detailed description of the apparatus can be found in Picozza et al. (2007).”
Cosmic-ray propagation with DRAGON2: I. numerical solver and astrophysical ingredients (2016, result): “Since 2006 the PAMELA [1] orbital observatory has measured the spectra of many charged cosmic-ray (CR) species and discovered several intriguing anomalies in the proton, helium and positron spectrum [2–4]; AMS-02 [5], on board of the International Space Station since 2011, confirmed some of those re”
The 511 keV emission from positron annihilation in the Galaxy (2010, background): “Indeed, cosmic ray spectra “anomalies” (with respect to “standard” astrophysical predictions) appear puzzling enough (Picozza et al., 2007) to open up new particle physics scenarios (Adriani et al., 2009,?; Chang et al., 2008).”