Emulsion chamber observations of Centauros, aligned events and the long-flying component

Abstract

Abstract:The cosmic ray emulsion chamber community has reported several unusual phenomena which are also relevant to experiments at the current high-energy accelerators, in particular the Fermilab Tevatron Collider and the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC). A summary of the "Cosmic Rays at Mountain Altitude" workshop held at Plock (Poland, September 2010) is given.PACS (2008)

The First Century of Cosmic Rays, an Historical Overview

“…Unusual particle physics phenomena which were discussed included the "Centauro" phenomena (high energy interactions with a dirth of neutral pions, hence gammas, as reaction products). Other phenomena discussed were the azimuthal anisotropy of the final states of very high energy interactions, and the "long flying component", an apparently stronglyinteracting reaction product particle which travels well beyond a conventional interaction length before interacting [5]. Although I personally do not believe that any of these three phenomena represent new physics, they merit discussion and study, and I certainly support the research activities and goals of these groups.…”

Detection of high energy electromagnetic and hadron components of air-shower cores in the new hybrid experiment “Pamir-XXI”

“…Among them 62 events are accompanied with a family of E γ ≥ 10 TeV [3,9]. Figure 2 shows air-shower size, N e , dependence of the maximum burst-density, n max b , of the event for all the events with n max b ≥ 10 4 and for those which accompany an atmospheric family of E γ ≥ 10 TeV.…”

The very forward CASTOR calorimeter of the CMS experiment

“…The original motivation for the CASTOR calorimeter construction was the search for new phenomena in HI collisions [1,56], such as strangelets [57] and disoriented chiral condensates (DCCs) [58]. The exotic Centauro events observed in CR collisions in the upper atmosphere [10,11] have been interpreted in terms of deconfined quark matter in the forward fragmentation region [9], where the net baryon number (baryochemical potential) is very high due to nuclear transparency. Strangelets require a similar environment for strangeness distillation.…”

“…The location and design of CASTOR are optimized for the study of the longitudinal development of electromagnetic and hadronic showers produced by particles emitted at very small -1 -2021 JINST 16 P02010 polar angles (between 0.16 • and 0.64 • ) with respect to the beam direction. This prime detector motivation -focused on searches for deeply penetrating particles, such as strangelets [1,2], connected to exotic events observed in high-energy cosmic ray (CR) interactions [9][10][11] -was extended also to measurements of generic properties of particle production at forward rapidities in inelastic proton and nuclear collisions, as well as to identify rapidity gaps (regions in the detector devoid of any particle production) in diffractive and exclusive processes [12,13]. The physics program and reach of the multipurpose CASTOR calorimeter are broad and unique, because no comparable instrumentation exists in this 𝜂 range at any other interaction point (IP) of the LHC.…”