The General Antiparticle Spectrometer (GAPS) is a balloon-borne experiment designed to identify cosmic anti-nuclei, in particular antideuterons from dark matter annihilation or decay, using the uniquely characterized atomic X-rays and charged particles from the decay of exotic atoms. With such a novel detection approach, benefitting from a custom-developed large-area silicon tracker and a large-acceptance time-of-flight system, GAPS is sensitive to antideuterons with kinetic energy <0.25 GeV/nucleon, which should offer an essentially background-free region to probe various dark matter models. Additionally, one long duration balloon flight allows GAPS to collect a high-statistics antiproton spectrum in an unexplored energy range.
The first flight of GAPS is scheduled for 2021 from Antarctica. This talk will present the science impact of the GAPS experiment, while focusing on the detection principle, conceptual design, details of construction status and the path forward to the initial flight.

Dr. Mengjiao Xiao graduated from SJTU on 2016 under the supervision of Prof. Jianglai Liu. He played vital roles in the PandaX-I construction, commissioning and data analysis, and was the lead authors of the first results from PandaX. Dr. Xiao’s thesis work was selected as one of the finalists of the Chen Guang Award of the High Energy Physics subpanel of CPS. After graduation, he was a postdoc first at Univ. of Maryland working on the JUNO neutrino experiment for two years, then moved to MIT to work on the GAPS space experiment, performing indirect search of dark matter using cosmic antinuclei.