| Abstract: | High-energy cosmic ray particles fill the Galaxy, mocking the reach of man-made accelerators.
The first part of the talk will follow a quest to understand one exotic, but rather extended, family of particles in this cosmic ray zoo: antimatter. Contrasting the latest measurements in space with accelerator data, we’ll see how hadronic collisions arise as the most likely source of the antimatter. This offers a solution for a decades-old debate, while turning the spotlight towards other astrophysical questions.
The second part of the talk will continue the antimatter journey back to Earth, with a puzzle in relativistic heavy-ion collisions: the apparently miraculous success of Boltzmann statistics in predicting the yields of loosely-bound (anti-)nuclei, in a system that should not be thermal. The combination of two traditionally disjoint lines of research — particle pair correlations, and nuclei yields — offers a resolution of this problem, and recent measurements of rare hyper-triton production suggest a possible breakthrough. |
