Payload For Antimatter Matter Exploration and Light-nuclei Astrophysics - Sources of Error

Sources of Error

Between 1 and 100 GeV, PAMELA is exposed to one hundred times as many electrons as antiprotons. At 1 GeV there are one thousand times as many protons as positrons and at 100 GeV ten thousand times as many. Therefore, to correctly determine the antimatter abundances, it is critical that PAMELA is able to reject the matter background. The PAMELA collaboration claimed in The electron hadron separation performance of the PAMELA electromagnetic calorimeter that less than one proton in 100,000 is able to pass the calorimeter selection and be misidentified as a positron when the energy is less than 200 GeV.

The ratio of matter to antimatter in cosmic rays of energy less than 10 GeV that reach PAMELA from outside the solar system depends on solar activity and in particular on the point in the 22 year solar cycle. The PAMELA team has invoked this effect to explain the discrepancy between their low energy results and those obtained by CAPRICE, HEAT and AMS-01, which were collected during that half of the cycle when the solar magnetic field had the opposite polarity. It is important to note that these results are consistent with the series of positron / electron measurements obtain by AESOP, which has spanned coverage over both polarities. Also the PAMELA experiment has contradicted an earlier claim by the HEAT experiment of anomalous positrons in the 6 GeV to 10 GeV range.