Francesca Bellini (Università di Bologna)
CosmicAntiNuclei is a new ERC-funded project that aims at shedding light on the production mechanisms of light nuclei and anti-nuclei in high-energy interactions. Based on precision measurements of rare antihelium production in proton-proton, proton-nucleus and nucleus-nucleus collisions with the ALICE detector at the LHC Run 3, the project will target comprehensively the modelling of light antimatter cluster formation. This is a necessary ingredient to predict the expected signal and background rates for dark matter anti-nuclei searches in space-borne experiments.
While waiting for it to start in the second half of 2021, I will give an overview of the CosmicAntiNuclei project and discuss the innovative approach based on the measurement of two-particle correlations that will be applied to investigate anti-nuclei formation via coalescence.