The search for cosmic strangelets with the supersonic concorde and with JACEE's circumpolar balloon flight in Antarctica

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.