Speakers
Description
Cosmic ray light antinuclei have been identified as a smoking-gun for indirect detection of dark matter. Species as $\overline{\rm{d}}$, $^3\overline{\mathrm{He}}$, and $^4\overline{\mathrm{He}}$, although in reach at the accelerators, have never been observed in cosmic rays. At low kinetic energies (below $\sim 1$ GeV/n), the dark matter signal is predicted to exceed the expected flux of secondary antinuclei produced by interaction of primary cosmic rays with the interstellar matter, mostly in the p-p, p-A channel, by 2-3 orders of magnitude. In 2021, a new channel was proposed in which dark matter annihilation can produce beauty hadrons, which subsequently decay into antinucleons. Through coalescence, these antinucleons can form light antinuclei. We present in this work, the first estimates in literature of the branching ratios for the decays $\overline{\Lambda_b} \to \bar{\rm{d}} + \rm{X}$ and $\rm{B^-} \to \bar{\rm{d}} + \rm{X}$. Simulation in PYTHIA were performed to generate beauty hadrons and model their decays. A state-of-the-art coalescence model is then applied to the final-state antinucleons to form antideuterons. Based on these estimates, we discuss the requirements for achieving, at the LHC, the first observation of these channels, in terms of both geometric acceptance and particle-identification capabilities.