Latin America's participation in astroparticle studies at the International Space Station (ISS) began in 1999, when IFUNAM was invited to participate in the AMS 02 project (200 researchers from 50 institutions), which has been operating in the EEI since May 2011. Specifically, IFUNAM worked in the construction of the Cherenkov Imaging Detector (RICH). Later we also collaborated in the construction of another cosmic ray detector (only higher energy) installed at the ISS in August 2018, called ISS-CREAM (50 researchers from 8 institutions).
The dominant component of cosmic rays reaching the vicinity of the Earth comes from galactic diffusion which produces rather monotonous power laws as energy spectra. Thus, an indirect search line for signals of dark matter (DM) consists of the identification of surpluses of antiparticles located energetically, which would be the product of the annihilation of WIMP's. Specifically, AMS 02 has reported the presence of such an anomaly, both in the positron and antiproton spectra, consistent with OM of mass ≈ 1 TeV. At IFUNAM we work on the measurement of the flux of anti-deuterons, the production of which has also been our project at ALICE at LHC-CERN. As a recent example of our group's results, in Phys. Rev. D 98 (2018) 023012, we proposed a simulation scheme to predict the diffusion background in the AMS 02 sensitivity zone.
