A statistical procedure for the identification of positrons in the PAMELA experiment
O. Adriani, G. C. Barbarino, G. A. Bazilevskaya, R. Bellotti, M., Boezio, E. A. Bogomolov, L. Bonechi, M. Bongi, V. Bonvicini, S. Borisov, S., Bottai, A. Bruno, F. Cafagna, D. Campana, R. Carbone, P. Carlson, M., Casolino, G. Castellini, L. Consiglio, M. P. De Pascale
TL;DR
This paper presents a statistical method for identifying positrons in the PAMELA experiment, improving background discrimination and confirming cosmic-ray phenomena like solar modulation and positron excess.
Contribution
It introduces a new statistical procedure for positron identification and assesses its stability and accuracy in background estimation.
Findings
Confirmed solar modulation effects on low-rigidity cosmic rays
Detected anomalous positron abundance above 10 GeV
Validated the background estimation method
Abstract
The PAMELA satellite experiment has measured the cosmic-ray positron fraction between 1.5 GeV and 100 GeV. The need to reliably discriminate between the positron signal and proton background has required the development of an ad hoc analysis procedure. In this paper, a method for positron identification is described and its stability and capability to yield a correct background estimate is shown. The analysis includes new experimental data, the application of three different fitting techniques for the background sample and an estimate of systematic uncertainties due to possible inaccuracies in the background selection. The new experimental results confirm both solar modulation effects on cosmic-rays with low rigidities and an anomalous positron abundance above 10 GeV.
Peer Reviews
No public reviews on file for this paper yet. If you reviewed it on a platform where reviews are public (OpenReview, ICLR, NeurIPS, ICML), you can paste yours below so the community can read it here.
Videos
No videos yet. Explain this paper in a talk, walkthrough, or lecture? Add one.