Comunicazione

# The cosmic antiproton puzzle.

##### D'Angelo F., Masi N., Oliva A.
Venerdì 16/09   09:00 - 13:30   Aula T - Caterina Scarpellini   III - Astrofisica
As there are no known astrophysical sources of cosmic ray (CR) antiprotons, they represent a good channel for indirect dark matter search. The secondary antiproton background is produced in collisions between primary CRs and the interstellar medium (spallation). In the last decade, thanks to high-precision measurements by AMS-02 and PAMELA, a possible tension between the observed antiproton flux and different predictive models has been highlighted, between 1 and $500 {GeV}$ in the antiproton kinetic energy. The large uncertainties which afflict antiproton flux predictions do not allow us to confirm the presence of an exotic signal, deserving further investigations. In the $10\mbox{--}100 {GeV}$ range, the dominant uncertainties are the production cross-section ones: the pp, p-He and He-p channels are responsible for almost all the cosmic antiprotons. Different models (Monte Carlo approaches, parametrisations, etc.) are used to predict the antiproton production cross-section but they are in tension among themselves. For this purpose, the COMPASS++/AMBER experiment will help us to resolve this tension with incoming p-He collisions data.