M. Rybczynski, Z. Wlodarczyk and G. Wilk report about a possible discovery of strangelets in cosmic rays.
According to the hypothesis proposed by Bodmer in 1971 and later
developed by E. Witten in 1984 matter consisted of
up (u), down (d) and strange (s) quarks – so-called strange matter – can be the most stable form of matter.
If this is true then a large variety of interesting possibilities appears.
For example most of so-called neutron stars should be quark stars (bare strange or hybrid ones). Also small pieces of strange matter can flow around in space forming a very particular specie of cosmic rays.
Drops of strange matter – strangelets – can be more or less easily distinguished from normal cosmic ray particles.
Strangelets should have large masses (A),
but charges (Z) much less than
it can be expected for clumps of normal nuclear matter of the same mass. I.e. the ratio Z/A should be large.
Before there were several types of events which were proposed to be strangelets registration:
price event (Z~46, A>1000), saito events (Z=14 A~350-450, exotic track events, and the most known centauro events.
Even durting the test flight of the AMS experiment on board of Space Shuttle events with low Z/A ratio were registered.
The authors of hep-ph/0410064 describe detection of
strange events on the Cosmo-LEP facility with the deterctor DELPHI. Previously similar events have been observed with
Cosmo-LEP with another detector – ALEPH.
You can read more news in physics in astrophysics in Russian at my page: http://xray.sai.msu.ru/~polar/sci_rev/current.html
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