Search for new massive particles in cosmic rays

In this paper, some unusual cosmic ray events are reviewed. They are the Yunnan event recorded in 1972 using a cloud chamber at Yunnan Cosmic Ray Station (YCRS) near Kunming, the south-west of China; the six exotic events (Kolar events) collected during 1965 to 1975 in the Kolar Gold Mine Field (KGF) in south India; and a double-core event obtained also in KGF in 1979 at a depth different from that where the other six were obtained. In addition, some interesting phenomena were also noticed: the abnormal upward muon flux observed by the MINI collaboration, and several intriguing signals seen in the proton detector in KGF. A careful kinematics analysis has shown that all these exotic events are likely to be related to a kind of heavy and slow-moving (i.e. with a Lorentz factor γ ≈ 2–5) particles produced from cosmic ray interactions. Besides, the rough flux estimates in these experiments seem to indicate that the event rate does not depend on the depth. Thus a natural hypothesis is that there is a heavy and neutral component in the cosmic rays which might be related with the long-sought weakly interacting massive particle (WIMP) - one of the most promising candidates of the dark matter of our Universe. Moreover, from the tracks seen in these events, there is also a signal of the possible existence of a kind of heavy and charged particles with a relatively long lifetime (say, longer than 10⁻⁹s) which might be the interacting products of the unknown cosmic ray particles mentioned above. We then turn to the question of how to search for these exotic particles in cosmic rays, and propose to build a dedicated magnetic spectrometer for identifying them.