Systematic Study On The Cosmic Ray Antiproton Flux

The AMS-02 collaboration has published the measurement of the cosmic antiproton to proton ratio (p) over bar /p and the (p) over bar p flux with a high precision up to similar to 450 GeV. In this work, we perform a systematic analysis of the secondary antiproton flux generated by the cosmic ray interaction with the interstellar gas. The uncertainties of the prediction from the cosmic ray propagation process and the hadronic interaction models are analyzed. We find the two effects may interplay with each other in the prediction. In some combinations of the propagation and hadronic interaction models the secondary (p) over bar p predictions give quite good fit to the AMS-02 data and thus set very stringent constraint on the dark matter annihilation cross section, while in some cases the predictions would deviate from the data. Especially, we find that the EPOS LHC hadronic model, which can fit the collider data very well, predicts a slightly lower (p) over bar /p ratio than the AMS-02 data at the high energy end.