- Open Access
Robust determination of antinuclei production from dark matter via weakly decaying beauty hadrons
Phys. Rev. D 112, 083017 – Published 7 October, 2025
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/s6cm-45b4
Abstract
Recently, the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS-02) Collaboration presented tentative evidence for the detection of cosmic antihelion-3 () events, alongside a comparable number of antideuterons (). If confirmed, these observations could revolutionize our understanding of cosmic-ray production and propagation and/or serve as compelling indirect evidence for dark matter. Given that the detection of cosmic is already at the limit of AMS-02 sensitivity, explaining the observation of even within the standard coalescence framework poses a significant challenge. It has recently been shown that a previously overlooked mechanism within the Standard Model of particle physics—namely, the production of antihelion via the displaced-vertex decay of baryons—could substantially enhance the flux arising from dark matter-induced processes. In light of these challenges, we present a tuning of pythia that is consistent with LEP data on the fragmentation function of quarks into hadrons—a critical factor for determining the multiplicity—and with ALICE and ALEPH data for the and spectra, which we employ to determine our coalescence model. Our refined pythia tuning, in conjunction with our coalescence model, results in a predicted branching ratio for the production of from decays that is consistent with the recent upper limit measured by LHCb. Furthermore, our prediction indicates that the contribution of and from beauty-hadron decays is negligible relative to the direct production from hadronization.
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