One way to search for identity of the mysterious Dark Matter that constitutes around 80% of the matter of our Universe is to look for cosmic rays originating from Dark Matter annihilation. Unfortunately, the Universe produces a lot of cosmic rays, and it is very hard to tell if any of it comes from Dark Matter. However, some years ago it was realised that antideuterons, the bound state of an antiproton and an antineutron, has very little production from ordinary astrophysical processes, and would be a smoking-duck signature for Dark Matter. Right now the AMS-02 experiment aboard the International Space Station is searching for antideuterons, and the GAPS balloon experiment is expected to launch from Antarctica in the fall of 2020.
This project will be focused on improving our models for antideuteron formation in Dark Matter annihilation, given the fairly well constrained expected spectra of the constituent antiprotons and antineutrons. In particular we will work on improving the so-called coalescence model by taking into account the input spectra of the antideuteron constituents and their formation times in a relativistic quantum field theory description.
The project requires a good understanding of Dark Matter phenomenology and quantum field theory. Most of the work will be focused on Monte Carlo simulations of Dark Matter annihilations, so good programming skills, in particular in C++ may be an advantage. There will be no visits to the experiments.