CRYOGENIC SEARCH FOR FRACTIONALLY CHARGED PARTICLES

1984
13 pages
Published in:
  • Phys.Rev.D 29 (1984) 791-803
Experiments:

Citations per year

198419851986198732
Abstract: (APS)
An experiment was performed to test the hypothesis of cryogenic trapping of fractionally charged particles, suggested as a possible explanation for the results of LaRue, Fairbank, Hebard, and Phillips at Stanford. A Nb-filament source was built, which could be cooled to 4.2°K and rapidly heated to several hundred °K. The source was operated in the terminal of a 700-kV Cockcroft-Walton accelerator and energy spectra of positively charged particles emerging from the filament were measured under a variety of operating conditions. No events above a background of 10−2 counts/sec were found in the energy regions where one might have expected several hundred particles of charge +13e or +23e as the source was heated. A mass range from 10 MeV/c2 to 100 GeV/c2 was covered in the experiment. Although negative results are rarely unambiguous, our findings exclude one class of hypotheses which might have explained the apparent fractional charges of the Stanford experiments.
  • PARTICLE: FRACTIONALLY CHARGED
  • QUARK: SEARCH FOR
  • LOW TEMPERATURE
  • NIOBIUM
  • ENERGY SPECTRUM: (CHARGED PARTICLE)
  • (CHARGED PARTICLE): ENERGY SPECTRUM
  • COUNTERS AND DETECTORS: EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS