The design of an array to record air showers of energy up to 1021 eV is described. Each recording station uses two scintillator tanks spaced 50 m apart and generates a master pulse if [Formula: see text] particles pass through each tank in coincidence, n can be preset in the range 1 to 10. Pulse heights from each scintillator and the time of arrival of the shower front (to ±50 ns) are recorded on tape. The stations are designed to run for at least one week between servicings. Details are given of the scintillators, the circuitry (operated entirely from storage batteries), and the coincidence techniques.
It is well known that a considerable number of experiments using high-energy accelerators or low-energy cosmic radiation have failed to find the quark. 1 However, much higher energies occur in cosmic-ray air showers. Moreover, several groups have reported the occurrence of very large transverse momenta in interactions in these showers. 2 " 5 These momenta imply the operation of a very strong force and this might be the quark-quark interaction. Accordingly, we have looked for quarks in air-shower cores using a delayed-expansion Wilson cloud chamber. 6,7 In one year from July 1968 we found four tracks whose appearance was that expected for a quark of charge fe. 8 Several alternative explanations could be ruled out. For instance, the appearance of the tracks could not be due to a statistical fluctuation in the number of ions produced because the numbers involved were much too large. They could not be due to the Chudakoff effect because the track length at half-minimum ionization was greater than 10 cm in all cases and greater than 20 cm in one case. They could not be due to poor illumination because adjacent tracks were well illuminated. Another possible explanation of a track having half the normal specific ionization is that it is due to a particle that traversed the cloud chamber before the clearing field was removed. It would then be possible for ions of one sign to drift out of the illuminated re-(U.S.) . 29, 1 (1942).
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