A wide range of experimental searches for strangelets (Strange Quark Matter with baryon number A less than 106) have been conducted since Witten [1] postulated the existence of Strange Quark Matter. However, none of these experiments, including terrestrial searches, accelerator searches, and the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer 01 experiment (AMS-01) could give a definite answer to their existence. Our experiment searches for strangelets in lunar soil, whose expected strangelet concentration (10-17 to 10-16, calculated from predicted cosmic ray strangelet flux [2]) is much higher than that on earth. The lunar soil sample is analyzed through the tandem Van-de-Graaff accelerator at Wright Nuclear Structure Laboratory (WNSL), Yale University. The accelerator together with our own designed detection system enables us to identify strangelets at a level of less than 1 per 1017 atoms.
1. E. Witten, Phys. Rev. D, 30, 272 (1984).
2. J. Madsen, Phys. Rev. D, 71, 014026 (2005)