Cosmic rays studies with the PAMELA space experiment

The instrument PAMELA, in orbit since June 15th, 2006 on board the Russian satellite Resurs DK1, is delivering to ground 16 Gigabytes of data per day. The apparatus is designed to study charged particles in the cosmic radiation, with a particular focus on antiparticles as a possible signature of dark matter annihilation in the galactic halo; the combination of a magnetic spectrometer and different detectors-indeed- allows antiparticles to be reliably identified from a large background of other charged particles. New results on the antiproton-to-proton and positron-to-all-electron ratios over a wide energy range (1-100GeV) have been recently released by the PAMELA Collaboration, and will be summarized in this paper. While the antiproton-to-proton ratio does not show particular differences from an antiparticle standard secondary production, in the positron-to-all-electron ratio an enhancement is clearly seen at energies above 10 GeV. Possible interpretations of this effect will be briefly discussed.
QC 20141002