TeV Particle Astrophysics 2026

The First Flight of the GAPS Antarctic Balloon Experiment

Not scheduled

20m

Oral Dark matter searches (both direct and indirect)

Speaker

Kazutaka Aoyama (JAXA/ISAS)

Description

The nature of dark matter remains one of the most important open questions in fundamental physics. Low-energy cosmic-ray antideuterons are a particularly compelling indirect detection channel because conventional astrophysical production is strongly suppressed at kinetic energies below approximately 1 GeV/n, making this energy range a uniquely low-background window for searches for new physics.
The General Antiparticle Spectrometer (GAPS) is the first experiment dedicated to the search for low-energy cosmic-ray antideuterons and other antinuclei. Using a novel exotic-atom technique with a large-acceptance balloon-borne instrument, GAPS is optimized for this rare-event search and provides the sensitivity and background rejection required to detect low-energy antideuterons. It also enables measurements of low-energy antiprotons and searches for antihelium. The instrument combines a plastic-scintillator time-of-flight system with a Si(Li) tracker to identify low-energy antiparticles through the formation, de-excitation, and annihilation of exotic atoms.
The first GAPS science payload was launched on 16 December 2025 and completed a 25-day Antarctic long-duration balloon flight. This talk will present an overview of GAPS and will report on the status of the first science flight, including preliminary results from flight data.