A search for the quark alpha
Abstract
The products of collisions between 11.5 GeV/c per nucleon gold ions and stationary lead nuclei have been searched for an electrically neutral 18 quark bound state known as the quark alpha. (46) The data were taken at the AGS accelerator facility at Brookhaven National Laboratory with the E864 detector. This detector consists of an open geometry mass spectrometer followed by a calorimeter. This is the first ever search for the quark alpha, and has been conducted by looking for a peak in the region between 6 nucleon masses and 6 lambda masses of the mass spectrum of neutral particles detected in the calorimeter. No such peak is observed. A limit on the rate of production of quark alphas is set at ${\sim}10\sp{-4}$ per central collision.
Degree
Ph.D.
Advisors
Hirsch, Purdue University.
Subject Area
Particle physics
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