High-Altitude Time-of-Flight Search for Non-Weakly Interacting Dark Matter in Cosmic Rays

Abstract

Supermassive electrically- or strongly-charged particles might constitute the missing matter in the galaxy. These particles would be non-relativistic, but nevertheless if these hypothetical particles have high enough mass, they might have enough momentum to be detectable below 5 g/cm^2 of atmosphere. We apply the time-of-flight technique to search for these hypothetical slow-moving, supermassive, highly-interacting particles at balloon altitude. We present un-cut histograms and a scatterplot of actual flight data, showing that we can account for most of the events as accidental coincidences. We can reject most (if not all) of these accidental coincidences by requiring a 4-counter coincidence, and by requiring very small changes in velocity in the interior detectors.

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