• DOI:10.1103/PhysRevLett.115.111101
• Corpus ID: 5574894

New upper limit on strange quark matter abundance in cosmic rays with the PAMELA space experiment.

@article{Adriani2015NewUL,
  title={New upper limit on strange quark matter abundance in cosmic rays with the PAMELA space experiment.},
  author={O. Adriani and Giancarlo Barbarino and Galina Bazilevskaya and Roberto Bellotti and M. Boezio and {\'E}. A. Bogomolov and M. Bongi and Valter Bonvicini and Sergio Bottai and Alessandro Bruno and Francesco Saverio Cafagna and Donatella Campana and Per Carlson and Marco Casolino and Giovanni Castellini and Cinzia De Donato and Cristian De Santis and Nicola De Simone and V. Di Felice and V. Formato and Arkady Moiseev Galper and A. V. Karelin and Sergey Koldashov and Sergey A. Koldobskiy and S. Yu. Krutkov and A. N. Kvashnin and Alexey A. Leonov and Vitaly Malakhov and L. Marcelli and Matteo Martucci and Andrey G. Mayorov and W. Menn and Matteo Merg{\'e} and V. V. Mikhailov and Emiliano Mocchiutti and Anthony P. Monaco and Nicola Mori and R. Munini and Giuseppe Osteria and Francesco Palma and Beatrice Panico and P. Papini and M. Pearce and Piergiorgio Picozza and M. Ricci and Sergio Bruno Ricciarini and Ritabrata Sarkar and Valentina Scotti and Mary J. Simon and Roberta Sparvoli and P. Spillantini and Y. I. Stozhkov and Andrea Vacchi and Elena Vannuccini and G. I. Vasilyev and S. A. Voronov and Yu. T. Yurkin and Gianluigi Zampa and Nicola Zampa},
  journal={Physical review letters},
  year={2015},
  volume={115 11},
  pages={
          111101
        }
}

• O. Adriani, G. Barbarino, +56 authors N. Zampa
• Published 8 September 2015
• Physics
• Physical review letters

In this work we present results of a direct search for strange quark matter (SQM) in cosmic rays with the PAMELA space spectrometer. If this state of matter exists it may be present in cosmic rays as particles, called strangelets, having a high density and an anomalously high mass-to-charge (A/Z) ratio. A direct search in space is complementary to those from ground-based spectrometers. Furthermore, it has the advantage of being potentially capable of directly identifying these particles, without any assumption on their interaction model with Earth's atmosphere and the long-term stability in terrestrial and lunar rocks. In the rigidity range from 1.0 to ∼1.0×10^{3}  GV, no such particles were found in the data collected by PAMELA between 2006 and 2009. An upper limit on the strangelet flux in cosmic rays was therefore set for particles with charge 1≤Z≤8 and mass 4≤A≤1.2×10^{5}. This limit as a function of mass and as a function of magnetic rigidity allows us to constrain models of SQM production and propagation in the Galaxy.