Studio di fattibilità per misure di sezioni d'urto indotte da protoni con produzione di antiprotoni in COMPASS++/AMBER

In the context of the physics-beyond-colliders initiative at CERN, the COMPASS++/AMBER collaboration submitted (June 2019) a Proposal in order to establish a "New QCD facility at the M2 beam line of the CERN SPS". My thesis work fits in one of the measurements proposed, in particular “Measurement of proton-induced antiproton production cross sections for dark matter searches”. The idea is to study the antiproton production cross sections in proton-proton and proton- 4 He scattering for projectile energies from several tens to a few hundreds GeV. In combination with similar measurements by LHCb in the TeV range, this measurements will provide a fundamental data set that is expected to allow for a significantly higher accuracy of the predicted natural flux of antiprotons in the galactic cosmic rays. This is of great importance as the indirect detection of dark matter (DM) is based on the search for products of DM annihilation or decay, which are expected to appear as distortions in the spectra of rare cosmic ray components like positrons, antiprotons, or even antideuterons. The dominant part of the antiprotons in our galaxy originates from inelastic scattering of incoming cosmic rays off interstellar-medium (ISM) nuclei at rest and represents the background when searching for small contributions from exotic sources; in order to obtain a significant sensitivity to DM signals, it is then very important to keep a small uncertainty on the prediction of cosmic anti-proton produced in the collision with the ISM. The proposed COMPASS++/Amber experiment would be able to collect precise data that will contribute to significant advances in the search for DM. The spectrometer layout will be based on the Compass set-up used in 2009, with a few major upgrades. In particular new front-end electronics (FEE) and trigger logics are required that are compatible with triggerless read-out (which include an FPGA-based TDC, ifTDC) are required. In this context, my thesis work is based on two main topics: 1. characterization of the iFTDC 2. Monte Carlo simulation and data analysis to perform a feasibility study of the proposed measurement with a COMPASS-like spectrometer