Measurement of the cosmic-ray low-energy antiproton spectrum with the first BESS-Polar Antarctic flight

The BESS-Polar spectrometer had its first successful balloon flight over Antarctica in December 2004. During the 8.5-day long-duration flight, almost 0.9 billion events were recorded and 1,520 antiprotons were detected in the energy range 0.1–4.2 GeV. In this Letter, we report the antiproton spectrum obtained, discuss the origin of cosmic-ray antiprotons, and use antiproton data to probe the effect of charge-sign-dependent drift in the solar modulation.