Abstract
The search for cosmic strangelet nuclei was carried out by two experiments with emulsion chambers. A balloon-borne JACEE emulsion chamber was flown at 3.5 g/cm2 for 200 h in Antarctica (JACEE-10 experiment) and the Concorde flights were made by ECHOS at an atmospheric depth of 110 g/cm2 between Paris and New York. No nuclei withZ⩾30 survived after traversing 60–120 g/cm2 of the detector materials in the JACEE instruments. No evidence for a long mean free path were found in the zenith angle distribution forZ/β⩾26 nuclei. The exposure factor used by the JACEE was 72 m2hsr. The intensity upperbounds,I⩽(2.2–9.7)×10−2/m2h sr, were obtained for strangelets having an atmospheric attenuation length of 220−50 g/cm2, which corresponds to the case for mass numberA=100–10000 andZ/β > 13. Concorde experiments (ECHOS) used both a thin and a thick emulsion chamber. The total exposure was 209 m2 h sr and no candidates with chargeZ⩾30 were found. The largest track hadZ/β=28.6±1.29 withβ ∼ 1. Nuclei observed with charge 13⩽Z⩽30 were consistent with the survival intensity of ordinary nuclei. The flux bounds from the ECHOS experiments were I⩽(2.1–5.0) x 10−2/m2h for strangelets with mass number 100⩽A⩽1000.
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Takahashi, Y., Capdevielle, J.N., Kawahara, A. et al. The search for cosmic strangelets with the supersonic concorde and with JACEE's circumpolar balloon flight in Antarctica. Hyperfine Interact 103, 99–111 (1996). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02317346
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02317346