HEP Colloquia 2026

by Mariaelena Boglione (Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare)

Wednesday 4 Feb 2026, 14:30 → 15:30 Europe/Rome

Sala Consiliare (Department of Physics)

QCD Predictions for Antiproton Production in  Cosmic Ray Proton–Proton Collisions 

Cosmic-ray antiprotons are a powerful probe of new physics and dark matter, but their interpretation is limited by uncertainties in hadronic production cross sections.

In this talk, I present NLO QCD predictions for antiproton and antineutron production in proton–proton collisions over center-of-mass energies from 17.2 GeV to 13 TeV. The calculations employ modern fragmentation functions with a systematic assessment of their uncertainties. At fixed-target energies, NA49 data at √s = 17.2 GeV are analyzed by matching the perturbative high-transverse-momentum region to a phenomenological description of the non-perturbative low-transverse momentum regime.

Integrating over transverse momentum, the antineutron-to-antiproton production ratio can be extracted to find a significantly smaller enhancement than the ~30% excess reported by NA49. These results provide a robust QCD baseline with quantified uncertainties for cosmic-ray antiproton flux predictions and indirect dark matter searches.