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Phys. Rev. Lett. 103, 092302 (2009) [4 pages]

Search for Stable Strange Quark Matter in Lunar Soil

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K. Han1, J. Ashenfelter2, A. Chikanian1, W. Emmet1, L. E. Finch1, A. Heinz2, J. Madsen3, R. D. Majka1, B. Monreal4,*, and J. Sandweiss1
1Physics Department, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut 06520, USA
2A. W. Wright Nuclear Structure Laboratory, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut 06520, USA
3Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Aarhus, DK-8000 Århus C, Denmark
4Laboratory for Nuclear Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139, USA

Received 27 March 2009; published 27 August 2009

See accompanying Physics Synopsis

We report results from a search for strangelets (small chunks of strange quark matter) in lunar soil using the Yale WNSL accelerator as a mass spectrometer. We have searched over a range in mass from A=42 to A=70  amu for nuclear charges 5, 6, 8, 9, and 11. No strangelets were found in the experiment. For strangelets with nuclear charge 8, a concentration in lunar soil higher than 10-16 is excluded at the 95% confidence level. The implied limit on the strangelet flux in cosmic rays is the most sensitive to date for the covered range and is relevant to both recent theoretical flux predictions and a strangelet candidate event found by the AMS-01 experiment.

© 2009 The American Physical Society

URL:
http://link.aps.org/doi/10.1103/PhysRevLett.103.092302
DOI:
10.1103/PhysRevLett.103.092302
PACS:
21.65.Qr, 14.80.−j, 36.10.−k

*Current address: Department of Physics, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA 93106, USA.

 
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